NOTES

Introduction

1. Carol Berkin, “‘We, the People of the United States’: The Birth of an American Identity, September 1787,” OAH Magazine of History 20, no. 4 (2006): 53–54; Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (New York: Norton, 1969), 532–536.

2. Akhil Reed Amar argues that despite the narrow electoral population intact when the Constitution was written, its very flexibility in permitting any expansion of the franchise is testament to its democratic nature. Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2005), 18–19.

3. The constitutional ratifying conventions were an important exception to this general rule. Historians have found that they were remarkably more democratic than the regular voting population. Amar, America’s Constitution, 17. For a full discussion of the democratic nature of the conventions, see Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).

4. Casey Miller, Kate Swift, and Stephanie Dowrick, The Handbook of Non-Sexist Writing for Writers, Editors, and Speakers (London: Women’s Press, 1981); Anne Curzan, Gender Shifts in the History of English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

5. The amendment was ratified in 1868 but drafted in the early months of 1866.

6. Journal of the Senate, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 501 (June 8, 1866).

7. Whereas identifying voters as male was new for national politics, the states had used gender-specific language for the franchise since the early 1800s. See chapter 1.

8. Constitutional scholars have consistently noted this fact in their histories of the amendment and commented on the impact that gendered language had on women in subsequent judicial interpretations of the amendment’s clauses. See, for example, Raoul Berger, The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989); Akhil Reed Amar, “Women and the Constitution,” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 18 (1994): 465–474; Akhil Reed Amar, “The Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment,” Yale Law Journal 101, no. 6 (1992): 1193–1284; Judith A. Baer, Equality under the Constitution: Reclaiming the Fourteenth Amendment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); Reva B. Siegel, “She the People: The Nineteenth Amendment, Sex Equality, Federalism, and the Family,” Harvard Law Review 115, no. 4 (2002): 947–1046; Nina Morais, “Sex Discrimination and the Fourteenth Amendment: Lost History,” Yale Law Journal 97, no. 6 (1988): 1153–1172.

9. Nina Morais comes the closest to exploring the origins of this change in her 1988 Yale Law Review article. Although Morais considers a few causes for the inclusion of gendered language, her central concern is using the amendment’s terms for litigating contemporary sex discrimination cases. Morais, “Sex Discrimination and the Fourteenth Amendment.”

10. By political community, I mean the group of people commonly understood to be eligible participants in American political life.

11. Roger B. Taney, The Dred Scott Decision: Opinion of Chief Justice Taney, with an Introduction by J. H. Van Evrie. Also, an Appendix, Containing an Essay on the Natural History of the Prognathous Race of Mankind, Originally Written for the New York Day-Book by Dr. S.A. Cartwright (New York: Van Evrie, Horton & Co., 1859), http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.law/llst.022. See also Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

12. 14 Stat. 27 (1866).

13. Nineteenth-century Americans did not believe voting to be a fundamental right of all people but understood it as a restricted, political privilege, able to be applied or taken away at the will of the government.

14. Howard Ohline, “Republicanism and Slavery: Origins of the Three-Fifths Clause in the United States Constitution,” William and Mary Quarterly, volume 28, no. 4 (1971): 563–584; U.S. Const., art. I, § 2.

15. U.S. Const., amend. XIII.

16. I have opted to focus on these two particular women’s rights activists because they reacted so strongly to the Fourteenth Amendment. This pulls me away from other suffrage activists in this period who were equally engaged with the cause but who, like Lucy Stone, did not respond with racism to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. These women and men were in the majority among the activist community. However, Stanton’s and Anthony’s fame and later importance to both the suffrage movement and feminism justify a focus on their postwar activities. On other early women’s rights activists see Andrea Moore Kerr, Lucy Stone: Speaking Out for Equality (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Joelle Million, Woman’s Voice, Woman’s Place: Lucy Stone and the Birth of the Woman’s Rights Movement (New York: Praeger, 2003); Colleen C. O’Brien, “‘The White Women All Go for Sex’: Frances Harper on Suffrage, Citizenship, and the Reconstruction South,” African American Review 43, no. 4 (2009): 605–620; Alison M. Parker, Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the State (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010); Michael Stancliff, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: African American Reform Rhetoric, and the Rise of a Modern Nation State (New York: Routledge, 2011); Margaret Washington, Sojourner Truth’s America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: Norton, 1996); Carol Faulkner, Women’s Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen’s Aid Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

17. Ellen DuBois argues that this quest resulted in the first independent feminist movement in the United States. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978; with new preface, 1999).

18. The earliest historians of suffrage did not engage with the problem of the suffragists’ racism, perhaps taking their cues from the suffragists themselves. See Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Frances Dana Gage, and Ida Husted Harper, History of Woman Suffrage: 1861–1876 (Rochester, NY: Susan B. Anthony, 1881); Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975). But since then, historians have started to consider the racism inherent in Stanton’s work during the 1860s. Angela Yvonne Davis, Women, Race, & Class (New York: Random House, 1981); Bettina Aptheker, Woman’s Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982); Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, “Daughters of Jefferson, Daughters of Bootblacks”: Racism and American Feminism (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986); Nancie Caraway, Segregated Sisterhood: Racism and the Politics of American Feminism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991); Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Kathi Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Macmillan, 2010); Sue Davis, The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Women’s Rights and the American Political Traditions (New York: NYU Press, 2010); Ann D. Gordon, “Stanton and the Right to Vote: On Account of Race or Sex”; Michele Mitchell, “‘Lower Orders,’ Racial Hierarchies, and Rights Rhetoric: Evolutionary Echoes in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Thought during the Late 1860s”; and Christine Stansell, “Missed Connections: Abolitionist Feminism in the Nineteenth Century,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker: A Reader in Documents and Essays, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois and Richard Cándida Smith (New York: NYU Press, 2007), 111–127, 128–151, 32–49; Sue Davis, The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Women’s Rights and the American Political Traditions (New York: NYU Press, 2010); Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1858–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

19. This does not mean that private opinions or behind-the-scenes political actions were irrelevant, merely beyond the scope of this project. For analysis of the private partisan motives and back room political decision making behind the Fourteenth Amendment see Joseph B. James, The Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956); William E. Nelson, The Fourteenth Amendment: From Political Principle to Judicial Doctrine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Earl M. Maltz, Civil Rights, the Constitution, and Congress, 1863–1869 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990).

20. For some of the many ways that gender was used in post-war American life, see Kathleen Ann Clark, Defining Moments: African American Commemoration and Political Culture in the South, 1863–1913 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife & Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Peter W. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Post-Emancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Mary Farmer-Kaiser, Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).

21. In focusing on language and public speech, I join scholars in what has been inelegantly labeled “new, new political history,” or the “newer political history.” This history seeks to incorporate consideration of language and culture into traditional political history. A discussion of its origins can be found in the introduction to Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). See also Liette Gidlow, “Delegitimizing Democracy: ‘Civic Slackers,’ the Cultural Turn, and the Possibilities of Politics,” Journal of American History 89, no. 3 (2002): 922–957, esp. 927–929; and Steven Pincus and William Novak, “Political History after the Cultural Turn,” Perspectives on History, May 2011, http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2011/1105/1105for3.cfm.

1. The White Man’s Government

1. Judd, “The Constitution—No. V,” Times (Hartford, CT), August 18, 1818, vol. 2, issue 86, 3.

2. “Judd” was a pseudonym that honored Connecticut’s early advocate of constitutional reform William Judd (d. 1804). Richard Buel and George J. Willauer, Original Discontents: Commentaries on the Creation of Connecticut’s Constitution of 1818 (Hamden, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), 112–113.

3. Connecticut held a convention to draft its first constitution between August 26, 1818, and September 16, 1818. Until this time the state had relied on its colonial charter. Ralph Gregory Elliot, foreword to Annotated Debates of the 1818 Constitutional Convention by Wesley W. Horton, Connecticut Bar Journal, Special Issue 65 (January 1991), SI-1; Judd, “The Constitution—No. V.”

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid. John Walker’s 1818 dictionary defined complexion as “Involution of one thing in another; the colour of the external parts of any body; the temperature of the body.” It seems most likely that Judd was referring to skin color. Walker, A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, and Expositor of the English Language … (New York: Collins and Hannan, 1818), 146.

6. On race and violence in the early Republic see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

7. On the founders’ ideology in the early Republic, see Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); on the democratic impulse, Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (Norton, 2005).

8. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967); and Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (New York: Norton, 1969). On state constitutions’ evolution in the early revolutionary era see Willi Paul Adams, The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); and Marc W. Kruman, Between Authority and Liberty: State Constitution-Making in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). On the tensions between varying strains of political ideology, see Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

9. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), app. A.9. Of the three states—Rhode Island, South Carolina, and New York—none applied property restrictions to all native white male citizens. Rhode Island’s requirement was restricted to immigrants, New York’s to African Americans. South Carolina permitted voters to substitute residency for property. Ibid., app. A.3.

10. James Madison famously warned against the dangers of democracy in Federalist 10, stating that “democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; [they] have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” James Madison, “No. 10: The Same Subject Continued, the Union as a Safeguard against Domestic Faction and Insurrection, From the New York Packet, Friday, November 23, 1787,” The Federalist Papers, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp.

11. There was some variation in the personal considerations required. Most states required residency, restricted the ballot from the mentally ill or the completely impoverished. Some required a voter to be able-bodied and others a U.S. citizen. Barbara Young Welke, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On the origins of the gendered state see Mary Beth Norton, Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Mark E. Kann, The Gendering of American Politics: Founding Mothers, Founding Fathers and Political Patriarchy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999).

12. Georgia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, South Carolina, and Virginia identified voters as “male.” Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Vermont identified them as “freemen.” Race restrictions were fewer before 1800. Only Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia restricted their franchise to “whites.” Keyssar, Right to Vote, app. A.1.

13. Of the six states without race restrictions, five were in New England (Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.) Of the four states that did not use “male” to define voters (Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Vermont), only Georgia did not use any gendered language at all. North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Vermont all identified voters as “men,” “freemen,” or in the singular, “man.” Benjamin P. Poore, The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the United States, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1878). Keyssar notes that despite the state’s neutral constitution, there is no evidence that African Americans or women ever voted in Georgia before the Civil War. Keyssar, Right to Vote, app. A-4, n5.

14. Jan Lewis critiques historians for being slow to see the connection between the franchise’s expansion for white men and its contraction for others. Lewis, “Rethinking Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1807,” Rutgers Law Review 63 (2010): 1017, 1033n100.

15. Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 180.

16. The poorest Americans were an important exception. As states expanded to include adult white men of little property, Delaware, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Virginia all implemented pauper restrictions, excluding those with no property at all from casting ballots. Keyssar, Right to Vote, app. A.6. On pauper restrictions see Robert J. Steinfeld, “Property and Suffrage in the Early American Republic,” Stanford Law Review 41, no. 2 (1989): 335–376; and James W. Fox Jr., “Citizenship, Poverty, and Federalism: 1787–1882,” University of Pittsburgh Law Review 60 (1998): 421, and especially 470–479.

17. Keyssar, Right to Vote, 26–29, 52. For more on increasing voting populations, see Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, “The Evolution of Suffrage Institutions in the New World,” Journal of Economic History 65, no. 4 (2005): 891–921, especially table 2.

18. James Horton and Lois Horton note that “the emphasis on mature manhood and independence as the preeminent qualifications for full citizenship in the republic provided the logical basis for the denial of such rights to dependent population groups such as women, children, and blacks.” Horton and Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 166.

19. Jacob Katz Cogan calls this “the look within,” arguing that beliefs about a voter’s capacity replaced property as the standard for voting rights. Cogan, “The Look Within: Property, Capacity, and Suffrage in Nineteenth-Century America,” Yale Law Journal 107, no. 2 (1997): 473. Rogers Smith similarly argues that as “egalitarian republican conceptions of citizenship” were adopted in the Jacksonian period, it became “imperative to make ascriptive disqualifications [like gender and race] explicit.” Smith, Civic Ideals, 213.

20. Keyssar, Right to Vote, 26–27. See also Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy, 1760–1860 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960); Kirk Harold Porter, A History of Suffrage in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1918).

21. In Maryland and New Jersey, the state legislatures first made changes in their legal codes, which were later confirmed in constitutional conventions: Maryland in 1810 and 1851, New Jersey in 1844. Poore, Federal and State Constitutions, 1:832, 840, 2:1315.

22. In debates the delegates rarely considered women’s voting, and when they did, it was only as a theoretical counterpoint to natural-rights suffrage arguments. They claimed that because women did not vote, voting was therefore not a natural right of all persons.

23. This despite the request for women’s enfranchisement in at least one of the constitutional conventions (New York, 1846). Jacob Katz Cogan and Lori D. Ginzberg, “1846 Petition for Woman’s Suffrage, New York State Constitutional Convention,” Signs 22, no. 2 (1997): 427–439. See also chapter 2.

24. Part of this theory was based on the idea that the poor would be unduly influenced by those whom they depended on financially, or that they would sell their votes in times of financial need. Part was derived from the fear that that the poor would legislate to redistribute wealth, violating the property rights of others. Keyssar, Right to Vote, 5–6, 9–12. Independence was also understood to be a particularly gendered quality. Long associated with white manhood, it was defined in contrast to others in varying states of dependence, usually women, slaves, servants, and children. Joan R. Gundersen, “Independence, Citizenship, and the American Revolution,” Signs 13, no. 1 (1987): 59–77; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Captured Subjects/Savage Others: Violently Engendering the New American,” Gender and History 5, no. 2, Summer 1993, 177–195.

25. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 1, Of the Rights of Persons (London: John Murray, 1862), 152.

26. New Hampshire had a property restriction in the colonial period. Its 1776 constitution did not discuss suffrage, but its 1784 constitution replaced the property requirement with payment of a poll tax. Williamson, American Suffrage, 12; Poore, Federal and State Constitutions, 2:1285. Vermont’s 1777 constitution did not require either property or tax payment for enfranchisement. Poore, Federal and State Constitutions, 2:1861. Keyssar, Right to Vote, app. A.1, A.3.

27. Keyssar, Right to Vote, 20.

28. Charles H. Wesley, “Negro Suffrage in the Period of Constitution-Making, 1787–1865,” Journal of Negro History 32, no. 2 (1947): 143–168. In 1831 a Quaker Philadelphian told French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville that although African Americans were legally entitled to the ballot, they did not vote because they would “be mistreated” if they attempted to do so. Tocqueville, Journey to America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 224–225, cited in Eric Ledell Smith, “The End of Black Voting Rights in Pennsylvania: African Americans and the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention of 1837–1838,” Pennsylvania History 65, no. 3 (1998): 279–299, 281.

29. In 1800 the Federalist victory was attributed to “the vote of a single Negro ward in the city of New York.” Dixon Ryan Fox, “The Negro Vote in Old New York,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 2 (1917): 252–256, cited in Wesley, “Negro Suffrage,” 155. Graham Russell Hodges estimates that in the 1830s “perhaps a thousand [African Americans] could vote across New York State.” Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 253; Edward Price, “The Black Voting Rights Issue in Pennsylvania, 1780–1900,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 100, no. 3 (1976): 357.

30. Keyssar, Right to Vote, 6.

31. Poore, 2:1311.

32. Acts of the 15th New Jersey General Assembly, November 18, 1790, 670, Special Collections, University Archives, Rutgers University Library, http://www.njwomenshistory.org/Period_2/qualvoters.htm. On women’s enfranchisement in New Jersey see I. N. Gertzog, “Female Suffrage in New Jersey, 1790–1807,” Women & Politics 10, no. 2 (1990): 47–58; Edward R. Turner, “Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey: 1790–1807,” Smith College Studies in History 1, no. 4 (1916): 165–187. On the deliberate nature of this language, see J. A. Klinghoffer and L. Elkis, “‘The Petticoat Electors’: Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1807,” Journal of the Early Republic 12, no. 2 (1992): 159–193.

33. Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 30–37; Klinghoffer and Elkis, “‘Petticoat Electors,’” 162.

34. Cited in Lewis, “Rethinking Women’s Suffrage,” 1030. Lewis notes that this percentage seems extremely unlikely as fewer than ten thousand women were legally qualified to vote. However, she also points out that lax inspections at the polls created a much broader franchise in New Jersey than the suffrage law would indicate, suggesting that perhaps even some married women without property may have voted (1030–1031).

35. Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 31.

36. Keyssar, Right to Vote, 7. A man’s autonomy took on greater importance after the Revolution, as the nation’s new democratic political structure relied on an independent citizenry. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

37. Keyssar, Right to Vote, 13–15, 35, 37–38.

38. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 17–31.

39. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Melvin Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds. The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996). Although historians disagree about exactly when the transition from a subsistence- to capitalist-based economy took place in America, and about whether or not this change constituted a revolution, there seems to be little doubt that such a transformation did take place in early America. Richard Lyman Bushman, “Markets and Composite Farms in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 55, no. 3 (1998): 351–347; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

40. Keyssar, Right to Vote, 34.

41. Wood, Empire of Liberty, 330.

42. Historian Sean Wilentz reports that this could be because “the legal complications of surveying western land and granting freehold titles often were too cumbersome to accommodate any propertied voting requirement.” Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: From Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2005), 117.

43. Keyssar, Right to Vote, app. A.2. Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, and Ohio all had tax or service requirements.

44. In most northern states, very gradually. See David N. Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Richard S. Newman and James Mueller, Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia: Emancipation and the Long Struggle for Racial Justice in the City of Brotherly Love (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011); Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Joanne P. Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

45. Keyssar, Right to Vote, 38. There is some evidence, however, that slaveholding politicians had to at least acknowledge the interests of the nonslaveholders, which served in some ways as a counterbalance to the slaveholding elite. See J. Mills Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); William G. Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Second Party System, 1824–1861 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996); Harry L. Watson, Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict: The Emergence of the Second American Party System in Cumberland County, North Carolina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981).

46. Keyssar, Right to Vote, app. A.1, A.2.

47. Wood, Empire of Liberty, 712.

48. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 17–31.

49. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), xxiii.

50. These same trends were also making slavery seem more problematic. If a person’s autonomy, independence, and therefore political fitness depended upon his labor, did not the enslaved, whose labor was appropriated by others, also possess independence and autonomy? Foner, Free Soil.

51. Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817–1862 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997).

52. The House of Representatives had open debates from its inception. Wood, Empire of Liberty, 58–60. In this period, some states began to open legislative debates. For example, Mississippi’s 1832 constitution declared in article 3, section 21, that “the doors of each house shall be open except on such occasions of great emergency as, in the opinion of the house, may require secrecy.” Poore, Federal and State Constitutions, 2:1071.

53. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 228.

54. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 226–232, 627.

55. Property restrictions and elite politics kept political participation consistently low in the early Republic; on average, only 20 percent of eligible voters voted between 1790 and 1800. By 1800, roughly 80 percent of eligible voters participated in elections. Wood, Empire of Liberty, 160, 302. However, some historians dispute whether interest translated into political action. Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 2000).

56. Joel H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 1.

57. On urban artisans’ political engagement see Wilentz, Chants Democratic. On Democrats, Whigs, and the development of the second American party system, see Robert Vincent Remini, The Election of Andrew Jackson (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963); Richard Patrick McCormick, The Second American Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966); Joel H. Silbey, The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

58. Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); David Wald streicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

59. The seventeen were Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. The first constitutions in Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, and South Carolina restricted the franchises to white males. Pennsylvania restricted the ballot to “freemen.” Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island retained race-neutral language, but added “male” to their constitutions in 1780, 1784, and 1842, respectively. Massachusetts and New Hampshire added gender restrictions to their constitutions well before altering their property provisions (Massachusetts, 1821; New Hampshire, 1792). Georgia removed the terms “male” and “white” from its 1777 constitution in 1789. Virginia added “white” and “male” to its constitution in 1830 but retained a reduced property restriction for the franchise. The other fourteen states entered the union without property restrictions on the franchise in their original constitutions. Poore, Federal and State Constitutions, 2 vols. On a history of the term “freemen,” which was applied exclusively to males, see B. Katherine Brown, “Freemanship in Puritan Massachusetts,” American Historical Review 59, no. 4 (1954): 865–883; Richard C. Simmons, “Freemanship in Early Massachusetts: Some Suggestions and a Case Study,” William and Mary Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1962): 422–428.

60. Maine did not use the word “white” in its constitution, but it did prohibit “Indians not taxed” from casting a ballot. Poore, Federal and State Constitutions, 1:790. In its constitution of 1845, Texas permitted all adult males to vote but excluded “Indians not taxed, Africans and descendants of Africans” from the franchise. Ibid., 2:1768.

61. Keyssar, Right to Vote, app. A.4, A.5. Although Georgia lacked a race restriction in its constitution, it is highly unlikely that free African American men were able to vote in this slaveholding state.

62. Nicholas Wood argues that in Pennsylvania free northern blacks were denied rights because of fears that their continued enfranchisement would escalate increasing sectional tensions. Wood, “‘A Sacrifice on the Altar of Slavery’: Doughface Politics and Black Disenfranchisement in Pennsylvania, 1837–1838,” Journal of the Early Republic 31, no. 1 (2011): 75–106. See also Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 42–44; Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 16–17; Hugh Davis, We Will Be Satisfied with Nothing Less: The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North during Reconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); and Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). In the face of this hostility, free African Americans instead relied on their own communities and over the course of the antebellum period built their own institutions for support.

63. Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 164–180. Zagarri notes that outdoor public politics also were increasingly hostile spaces for free African Americans (171–173). On women’s earlier political influence, see Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996, 1980); Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York: Norton, 1980); Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000); Susan Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). However, women would find new ways to engage in party politics. Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Ryan, Women in Public.

64. Although prompted by accusations of corruption in an intraparty struggle between Democratic-Republicans, women’s disfranchisement in New Jersey also reflected the emerging trend away from property and toward identity as the legitimate marker of voting citizenship. Lewis, “Rethinking Women’s Suffrage,” 1031–1033; Judith Apter Klinghoffer and Lois Elkis, “‘The Petticoat Electors,’” 186–189.

65. Poore, 1:35, 104, 196, 323, 442, 514, 538, 701, 790, 984; 2:1056, 1106, 1459, 1768, 2030.

66. On state constitutional amendment process in the 1820s–’50s, see Laura J. Scalia, America’s Jeffersonian Experiment: Remaking State Constitutions, 1820–1850 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999).

67. Only Pennsylvania did not change its constitutional language about race as it replaced its property-holding provision with a taxation requirement in 1776. Wood, “‘Sacrifice on the Altar of Slavery,’” 79.

68. States that did not extensively debate race restrictions in convention, such as Delaware and New Jersey, already had restrictions in place. Delaware’s 1792 constitution restricted voters by race, and thus race and gender restrictions were passed without comment in its 1831 convention. M. M. Gouge William, Debates of the Delaware Convention: For Revising the Constitution of the State; Or, Adopting a New One: Held at Dover, November, 1831 (Wilmington, DE: S. Harker, 1831), 186–189, 252. New Jersey disfranchised women and African Americans by statute in 1807 but did not revise its constitution until 1844, which readily incorporated the 1807 changes into the new constitution. New Jersey Constitutional Convention, Journal of the Proceedings of the Convention to Form a Constitution for the Government of the State of New Jersey: Begun at Trenton on the Fourteenth Day of May, A.D. 1844, and Continued to the Twenty-ninth Day of June, A.D. 1844 (Trenton, NJ: Franklin S. Mills, 1844), 96–104.

69. New York held two conventions in this period in 1821 and 1846. North Carolina convened its convention in 1835 and Pennsylvania in 1837–38.

70. For the states altering their suffrage provisions between 1790 and 1820, the records of the actual speeches given in the legislatures or conventions are limited. Newspapers in this period rarely sent reporters to legislative proceedings, and when they did, what was recorded was often incomplete. For example, when faced with a lengthy debate about the franchise in the Connecticut convention the evening of Wednesday, September 9, 1818, the Connecticut Courant reporter demurred from recording the speeches, saying only, “We would remark again, that, in the course of all these proceedings, there has been a great deal of desultory debate, which it is impossible, and would be improper to give: indeed, the whole business has been made a subject of conversation.” Connecticut Courant, September 22, 1818, 2.

71. Each state altering its constitution was also doing so within partisan and political contexts that shaped convention debates in particular ways. For example, Republicans in Connecticut’s 1818 convention advocated several reforms that could have helped them win elections, such as an independent judiciary, districted voting, and reapportionment, but these were defeated by a coalition of moderates and Federalists. Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 185. For the most part, I do not discuss these particulars because I am more concerned with broad themes and ideas articulated repeatedly in multiple contexts by diverse and distant speakers than with local partisan peculiarities.

72. Mentor, “Make Ready!!,” Connecticut Journal, April 1, 1817, 3.

73. Nathaniel H. Carter, William L. Stone, and Marcus Tullius Cicero Gould, Reports of the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of 1821 Assembled for the Purpose of Amending the Constitution of the State of New York: Containing All the Official Documents Relating to the Subject, and Other Valuable Matter (Albany: E. and E. Hosford, 1821), 237 (hereafter cited as NY1821).

74. At the end of 1821, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania all required voters to be taxpayers or have performed militia duty. Poore, Federal and State Constitutions, 2 vols.; Keyssar, Right to Vote, app. A.2.

75. Columbian Register (New Haven, CT), November 24, 1818, 2.

76. E. Guyer, The Daily Chronicle and Convention Journal: Containing the Substance and Spirit of the Proceedings of the Convention Which Assembled at the State Capital in Harrisburg, May 2, 1837 to Alter and Amend the Constitution of the State of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg: E. Guyer, 1837), 315.

77. Ibid., 321.

78. Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of North Carolina Called to Amend the Constitution of the State, Which Assembled at Raleigh, June 4, 1835. To Which Are Subjoined the Convention Act and the Amendments to the Constitution (Raleigh: Joseph Gales and Son, 1836), 61 (hereafter cited as NC1835).

79. NC1835, 61.

80. John Agg, Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania: To Propose Amendments to the Constitution, Commenced… at Harrisburg, on the Second Day of May, 1837 (Harrisburg: Packer, Barrett and Parke, 1837), 10:21 (hereafter cited as PA1837).

81. PA1837, 9:385.

82. NC1835, 80.

83. NC1835, 77–78.

84. Keyssar, Right to Vote, 14–15, 35–36.

85. The Pennsylvania delegate making this argument particularly was H. Gold Rogers, a twenty-five-year-old suffrage committee member from Allegheny. Rogers’s father, Edward, had served as a delegate to the New York Constitutional Convention in 1821. Harold D. Langley, “The Tragic Career of H. G. Rogers, Pennsylvania Politician and Jacksonian Diplomat,” Pennsylvania History 31, no. 1 (1964): 30–61.

86. Guyer, Daily Chronicle and Convention Journal, 323.

87. NY1821, 185. Root is most likely referring to the national 1792 Militia Act, which restricted military duty to free white men. Robert Reinders, “Militia and Public Order in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American Studies 11, no. 1 (1977): 81–101.

88. NY1821, 180.

89. Ibid., 187–188. NC1835, 61.

90. PA1837, 10:49. The partisan politics here are particularly pointed since Jackson’s fellow Democrats were some of the most vocal opponents of African Americans’ voting rights in all the conventions. African American men also used Jackson’s text to proclaim their own service to the state. See chapter 2.

91. PA1837, 10:82.

92. NC1835, 62.

93. PA1837, 9:327.

94. NC1835, 69. For further discussion of the application of familial metaphors to suffrage rights and the state, see chapter 3.

95. PA1837, 10:85.

96. In New York in 1821, women were discussed most extensively in relation to reforms to libel law, as supporters argued that the law was necessary to protect the “fairer sex” from libelous slanders. NY1821. In North Carolina, the longest discussion that included women was a debate about their presence in the viewing galleries at the convention. NC1835. On the other hand, New York’s 1846 convention delegates spent a considerable amount of time discussing the rights of women as they debated extending property rights to married women. But the convention did not contemplate their enfranchisement. See Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982).

97. NY1821, 248.

98. Ibid., 249.

99. PA1837, 9:378.

100. NY1821, 252. His fellow conservative delegate Colonel Young claimed that the ultimate logical conclusion to a franchise disconnected from property and applied equally to all people was the enfranchisement of black women: “On that principle, you must admit negresses as well as negroes to participate in the right of suffrage.” Ibid., 191.

101. PA1837, 9:379.

102. Ibid.

103. Ibid., 9:389–390. Brown’s comment about women’s disfranchisement in New Jersey is interesting. Because he made it without offering any explanation or context, it seems to indicate that he believed his colleagues were familiar with the incident, even though it had taken place thirty years earlier.

104. Whereas we moderns understand gender and race to be merely socially meaningful rather than biologically determined, Americans in the nineteenth century believed those distinctions between persons to be grounded exclusively in biology.

105. NC1835, 78.

106. In New York State, African American voters, Wilentz notes, had been “overwhelmingly loyal to the Federalists.… In close elections, the black vote, although a small portion of the total, could swing key districts and even (or so it was alleged in 1813) decide the balance of power in the state assembly.” Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 192. Partisan concerns over black voters’ affiliation likely would also have factored into whether Pennsylvania and North Carolina’s delegates supported or opposed their enfranchisement.

107. NC1835, 69.

108. Ibid.

109. There were race riots in Philadelphia in 1829, in 1834, and in 1838. Nash, Forging Freedom, 275–277.

110. PA1837, 9:393.

111. Ibid., 10:114.

112. Wood, “‘Sacrifice on the Altar of Slavery.’”

113. PA1837, 9:393; 10:57–58.

114. They did not seem to have any trouble with a distinction based on sex, however.

115. Guyer, Daily Chronicle and Convention Journal, 312.

116. Guyer, Daily Chronicle and Convention Journal, 316. Earle, though a Democrat, was a member of the Pennsylvania’s Abolition Society, as well as serving as the Liberty Party’s vice presidential candidate in 1840. Wood, “‘Sacrifice on the Altar of Slavery,’” 96.

117. PA1837, 10:84.

118. Ibid., 10:15.

119. William G. Bishop and William H. Attree, Report of the Debates and Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of New York: 1846 (Albany: Office of the Evening Atlas, 1846), 1014–1015 (hereafter cited as NY1846).

120. Ibid., 1031.

121. Ibid.

122. Ibid., 1016.

123. Ibid., 1017.

124. Ibid., 1027–1028.

125. Ibid., 1030.

126. Ibid.

127. Gender, for them, so obviously disqualified women from political activity that it did not even merit consideration.

128. North Carolinians did not make arguments about the fluidity or instability of race in their suffrage convention. As a slave state, not only did North Carolina have legal means to define race, but its suffrage provision included a brief definition of race by referring to a voter’s ancestry.

129. NY1821, 188.

130. Ibid.

131. PA1837, 10:64.

132. Ibid., 10:65.

133. NY1821, 365.

134. PA1837, 10:64.

135. Opponents pointed to legal precedents in which the word “white” had been used without confusion since the revolutionary era. See the arguments of Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, delegate Robert Fleming, ibid., 10:60, 62.

136. NY1821, 191.

137. Ibid., 365.

138. This comment conflates the Victorian ideal of white womanhood as fair-skinned with all women, handily ignoring all women of color. PA1837, 10:82.

139. NY1846, 1014.

140. NY1821, 191.

141. Ibid., 185.

142. PA1837, 10:57.

143. Ibid., 9:368.

144. NY1846, 1019.

145. PA1837, 10:114.

146. Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s Unequal Freedom offers an excellent synthesis of the scholarship on the connections between gender, race, and the evolution of citizenship. See especially pages 18–55.

147. Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

2. Manhood and Citizenship

1. “New York State Convention,” Colored American, August 29, October 31, 1840, January 2, 9, 1841, in Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865, ed. Philip S. and George E. Walker (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 1:6, 8.

2. “Address of the New York State Convention to their Colored Fellow Citizens,” C olored American, November 21, 1840, in Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 1:16.

3. “Address of the New York State Convention of Colored Citizens, to the People of the State,” Colored American, December 19, 1840, in ibid., 1:22.

4. William G. Bishop and William H. Attree, Report of the Debates and Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of New York: 1846 (Albany: Office of the Evening Atlas, 1846), 646 (hereafter cited as NY1846). The three other petitions were one presented on July 11 requesting “women and parsons to be voters and hold office,” one presented on August 27 “in favor of women’s rights,” and one presented on September 21, “praying… that females be allowed to go to the polls and deposit their ballot.” NY1846, 284, 763, 913. On the quoted petition’s origins, see Lori D. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman’s Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Jacob Katz Cogan and Lori D. Ginzberg, “1846 Petition for Woman’s Suffrage, New York State Constitutional Convention,” Signs 22, no. 2 (1997): 427–439. Roughly sixty-seven to sixty-eight petitions were presented to the convention (one batch of an unspecified number of petitions was presented “severally,” making it difficult to know the precise number). Of these, only six others dealt with suffrage rights: two specifically sought black men’s enfranchisement, and four referred to suffrage generally. NY1846.

5. NY1846, 646.

6. African Americans’ claims for equality took many forms and appropriated varied rhetorical techniques, but I limit my analysis here to northern African American activists’ public rhetoric about voting rights.

7. Martha S. Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

8. Patrick Rael has argued that in this period black activists “appropriated the ideas of antebellum society, only to reformulate hostile notions into potent sources of empowerment and uplift.” Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 3.

9. Black men’s claim to manhood was essential beyond the political sphere, as one strain of white racist thinking sought to feminize black men, particularly the enslaved. Michael Kimmel notes that “American manhood… [was] grounded upon the exclusion of blacks and women, the nonnative-born (immigrants), and the genuinely native-born (Indians), each on the premise that they weren’t ‘real’ Americans, and couldn’t, by definition, be real men.” He continues, “The perceived—or just as frequently, projected—effeminacy of nonwhite men was a standard racialist theme.” Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 67, 69.

10. “Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men held in the City of Syracuse, NY, October 4, 5, 6, and 7, 1864 with the Bill of Wrongs and Rights, and the Address to the American People,” page 9, in Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830–1864, ed. Howard Holman Bell (New York: Arno Press, 1969) (hereafter cited as Bell, Minutes). Claiming the status of respectable men was also an essential strategy for black reformers in establishing independence for the African American community. Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

11. The 1846 petition is just one indication that even before Seneca Falls, ideas about women’s rights were certainly circulating, at least among northerners, radical Quakers, political abolitionists, and property-rights reformers. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins. See also Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). Martha Jones also traces women’s rights ideas and arguments through the African American community as early as the 1830s. Jones, All Bound Up Together.

12. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, In the School of Anti-Slavery, ed. Ann D. Gordon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 78 (hereafter cited as Papers: 1).

13. “The Anniversaries, Thirty-Second Anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society,” New York Daily Tribune, May 10, 1865, 8.

14. Though antislavery efforts were the central focus of much community activism, rejecting the colonization movement and ameliorating the condition of urban African Americans were also on the activists’ agenda. Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008); Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 155–158; Richard S. Newman, Patrick Rael, and Phillip Lapsansky, Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature, 1790–1860 (New York: Routledge, 2000); Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: Penguin, 2012). On free black northern urban communities see Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787–1848 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988); Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

15. Nathaniel H. Carter, William Leete Stone, and Marchus Tulles Cicero Gould, Reports of the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of 1821 Assembled for the Purpose of Amending the Constitution of the State of New York: Containing All the Official Documents Relating to the Subject, and Other Valuable Matter (Albany: E. and E. Hosford, 1821), 134; NY1846, 220, 424; John Agg, Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania: To Propose Amendments to the Constitution, Commenced… at Harrisburg, on the Second Day of May, 1837, vols. 2, 9, 10 (Harrisburg: Packer, Barrett and Parke, 1837).

16. On the history of the black convention movement see W. H. Pease and J. H. Pease, “The Negro Convention Movement,” in Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience, ed. Nathan I. Huggins, Martin Kilson, and Daniel M. Fox (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 191–205; J. H. Pease and W. H. Pease, “Negro Conventions and the Problem of Black Leadership,” Journal of Black Studies 2, no. 1 (1971): 29–44; Bella Gross, “The First National Negro Convention,” Journal of Negro History 31, no. 4 (1946): 435–443; Howard H. Bell, “National Negro Conventions of the Middle 1840’s: Moral Suasion vs. Political Action,” Journal of Negro History 42, no. 4 (1957): 247–260.

17. Bell, Minutes; Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 2 vols.

18. Hugh Davis, “The Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League and the Northern Black Struggle for Legal Equality, 1864–1877,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 126, no. 4 (2002): 612; Gross, “First National Negro Convention,” 440.

19. Pease and Pease, “Negro Conventions,” 31–32.

20. Black activists in New York held two meetings, one in 1840 and another in 1841. Pennsylvania’s African American activists met in 1841, Indiana’s in 1842, and Michigan’s in 1843. Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 1:5–30, 106–118, 173–175, 181–197.

21. The subjects of the conventions reflected this evolution: changing from conventions held “for the improvement of the people of color” to those held for “considering their moral and political condition as American Citizens.” “Minutes of the Fourth Annual Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Colour in the United States, held by adjournments, in the Asbury Church, New-York, from the 2d to the 12th of June inclusive, 1834,” in Bell, Minutes; “Minutes of the National Convention of Colored Citizens: Held at Buffalo on the 15th, 16th 17th 18th and 19th of August, 1843, for the Purpose of Considering their Moral and Political Condition as American Citizens,” in Bell, Minutes.

22. “Constitution of the American Society of Free Persons of Colour, for Improving Their Condition in the United States; for Purchasing Lands; and for the Establishment of a Settlement in Upper Canada, also the Proceedings of the Convention, with Their Address to the Free Persons of Colour in the United States,” page 9, in Bell, Minutes.

23. “Minutes and Proceedings of the First Annual Convention of the People of Colour Held by Adjournments in the City of Philadelphia from the Sixth to the Eleventh of June, Inclusive, 1831,” pages 4–5, in Bell, Minutes.

24. “Minutes of the State Convention, of the Colored Citizens of the State of Michigan, Held in the City of Detroit on the 26th & 27th of October, 1843, for the Purpose of Considering Their Moral and Political Condition, as Citizens of the State,” in Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 1:181.

25. Conventions held in 1831 and 1832 advocated and gathered funding for a college in New Haven, Connecticut, but local resistance hindered this effort. By 1833 and 1834, the national conventions’ focus had turned to manual labor schools. See Bell, Minutes.

26. “Proceedings of the State Convention of Colored People Held at Albany, New York, on the 22d, 23d, and 24th of July, 1851,” in Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 1:73.

27. Ibid., 1:74.

28. “Proceedings of the State Convention of Colored Citizens of the State of Illinois, Held in the City of Alton, Nov. 13th, 14th, and 15th, 1856,” in Foner and Walker, 2:73.

29. “Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored People, and Their Friends, held in Troy, NY, on the 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th October, 1847,” page 27 in Bell, Minutes.

30. “Proceedings of the State Convention of the Colored Freemen of Pennsylvania, Held in Pittsburgh, on the 23d, 24th, and 25th of August, 1841, for the Purpose of Considering Their condition, and the Means of Its Improvement,” in Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 1:115.

31. “Address of the New York State Convention of Colored Citizens, to the People of the State,” Colored American, December 19, 1840, in Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 1:20–21.

32. Ibid., 1:21.

33. Ibid., 1:20. Although the address listed these services to the state as reasons for black men’s equal enfranchisement, it did not rest their claims upon service exclusively. Rather, it contended that suffrage was an inherent right of manhood.

34. “Minutes of the State Convention, of the Colored Citizens of the State of Michigan, Held in the City of Detroit on the 26th & 27th of October, 1843, for the Purpose of Considering Their Moral and Political Condition, as Citizens of the State,” in Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 1:192. The Rochester national convention in 1853 included within its address to the people of the United States the full text of Andrew Jackson’s 1814 proclamation of equality for black and white soldiers serving in New Orleans. “Proceedings of the National Convention, Held in Rochester on the 6th, 7th, and 8th of July, 1853, ‘Address of the Colored National Convention, to the People of the United States,’” page 15, in Bell, Minutes.

35. “Report of the Proceedings of the Colored National Convention, Held at Cleveland, Ohio, on Wednesday September 6, 1848,” page 16, in Bell, Minutes.

36. “Address of the Colored National Convention, to the People of the United States,” Rochester, 1853, page 9, in Bell, Minutes.”

37. “Minutes of the State Convention of the Coloured Citizens of Pennsylvania, Convened at Harrisburg, December 12th and 13th, 1848,” in Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 1:131.

38. Ibid., 1:131–132. This argument is similar to one made by John Hunt, a delegate to the New York 1846 constitutional revision convention, who stated that if African Americans could change their skin color they could be members of the political community. See chapter 1.

39. “Minutes of the State Convention of the Coloured Citizens of Pennsylvania,” in Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 1:132.

40. “Constitution of the American Society of Free Persons of Colour, for Improving Their Condition in the United States; for Purchasing Lands; and for the Establishment of a Settlement in Upper Canada, Also the Proceedings of the Convention, with their Address to the Free Persons of Colour in the United States,” page 11, Bell, Minutes; and “Minutes and Proceedings of the First Annual Convention of the People of Colour Held by adjournments in the City of Philadelphia from the Sixth to the Eleventh of June, Inclusive, 1831,” page 5, in Bell, Minutes.

41. “Minutes and Proceedings of the Second Annual Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Color in these United States, Held by Adjournments in the City of Philadelphia from the 4th to the 13th of June Inclusive, 1832,” page 32, in Bell, Minutes.

42. The use of “panoply” here is gendered as well, adopting the meaning of the word as a complete set of armor, military gear typically worn by men. “New York State Free Suffrage Convention, September 8, 1845,” in Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 1:39.

43. “Minutes of the State Convention of the Coloured Citizens of Pennsylvania,” in Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 1:126.

44. Ibid., 1:131.

45. “Address of the New York State Convention to their Colored Fellow Citizens,” Colored American, November 21, 1840, in Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 1:16.

46. Ibid., 1:17.

47. “Proceedings of the First Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of Illinois, Convened at the City of Chicago, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, October 6th, 7th, and 8th, 1853,” in Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 2:64.

48. “Convention of the Colored Citizens of Massachusetts, August 1, 1858,” in Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 2:101.

49. Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Jones, All Bound Up Together.

50. Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 188–189; Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Jones argues that this mode of activist engagement was essential given the vitriolic racist critique of African American women’s public actions ubiquitous in the press in the period. Jones, All Bound Up Together, 23–58.

51. For example, The Colored American reported that there were “numerous” spectators “male and female” attending the 1840 convention in New York. The Colored American, August 29, 1840, in Foner and Walker, Proceedings 1:6.

52. “Report of the Proceedings of the Colored National Convention,” held at Cleveland, Ohio, on Wednesday, September 6, 1848. In Bell, Minutes, 11–12.

53. Jeffrey, Great Silent Army of Abolitionism; Stacey M. Robertson, Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Beth A. Salerno, Sister Societies: Women’s Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008).

54. On Garrisonian abolitionists and their approach to women’s rights, see Aileen Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969); Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of An Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978; with new preface, 1999).

55. Although Kraditor notes that the split in the movement was in part driven by divisions over women’s participation in the society, she argues that this was in itself merely a reflection of a more fundamental division between conservative and radical abolitionists. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism, 10.

56. Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 185–186.

57. On the efforts of northern middle-class African Americans to preserve gender distinctions see James Oliver Horton, “Freedom’s Yoke: Gender Conventions Among Antebellum Free Blacks,” Feminist Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 51–76; R. J. Young, Antebellum Black Activists: Race, Gender, and Self (New York: Garland, 1996).

58. “Suffrage Convention of the Colored Citizens of New York, Troy, September 14, 1858,” in Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 1:99.

59. “Colored Men’s State Convention of New York, Troy, September 4, 1855,” in Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 1:91.

60. Jones, All Bound Up Together, 88.

61. Holly Berkley Fletcher, Gender and the American Temperance Movement of the Nineteenth Century, Studies in American Popular History and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2008); Scott C. Martin, Devil of the Domestic Sphere: Temperance, Gender, and Middle-Class Ideology, 1800–1860 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008); Ian R. Tyrrell, “Women and Temperance in Antebellum America, 1830–1860,” Civil War History 28, no. 2 (1982): 128–152; Wellman, Road to Seneca Falls; Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women’s Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). On northern women’s partisan engagement in the antebellum period, see Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Voices without Votes: Women and Politics in Antebellum New England (Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press, 2010). Although very few southern women engaged in antebellum women’s rights activism, they were politically engaged. See Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia, Gender and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

62. Sally G. McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 104–148.

63. Wellman, Road to Seneca Falls, 193; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences, ed. Theodore Stanton and Harriot Stanton Blatch, (New York: Arno, 1969), 1:146.

64. Papers: 1, 77.

65. Philip S. Foner, Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976), 13–14.

66. McMillen, Seneca Falls, 126–127.

67. Judith Wellman sees a close comparison between the language used by New York convention delegates in 1821 and 1846 and that used by women’s rights activists. She says that the arguments for voting expansion in 1821 “presaged every major theme that would emerge in the fight for woman’s suffrage a generation later.” I don’t disagree, if the major themes are defined as suffrage as a natural vs. political right and the broad republican ideology that connected taxation with representation. However, my reading of the women’s conventions documents finds that women gave little attention to the service/identity tropes being used in the constitutional conventions. Wellman, Road to Seneca Falls, 139–158. On women’s service to the state, see Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998).

68. On the tensions over how activists interpreted the “proper” role of women in the abolition movement, see Jeffrey, Great Silent Army of Abolitionism; Robertson, Hearts Beating for Liberty.

69. A few of the many books that discuss the link between abolition and the early women’s rights movement are DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage; Blanche Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); McMillen, Seneca Falls; and Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

70. Women’s Rights Committee, The Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention Held at Worcester, October 23d & 24th, 1850 (Boston: Prentiss & Sawyer, 1851), 8 (hereafter cited as Worcester1850).

71. Women’s Rights Committee, The Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention, held at Worcester, October 15th and 16th, 1851 (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1852), 30 (hereafter cited as Worcester1851). Compared with those for Stanton and Anthony, the biographies of Lucy Stone are few. See Alice S. Blackwell, Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman’s Rights (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1930); Elinor Rice Hays, Morning Star: A Biography of Lucy Stone, 1818–1893 (New York: Harcourt, 1961); Andrea Moore Kerr, Lucy Stone: Speaking Out for Equality (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Joelle Million, Woman’s Voice, Woman’s Place: Lucy Stone and the Birth of the Woman’s Rights Movement (Praeger, 2003); Sally G. McMillen, Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

72. Women’s Rights Committee, The Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention Held at Syracuse, September 8th, 9th, and 10th, 1852 (Syracuse: J. E. Masters, 1852), 7 (hereafter cited as Syracuse1852).

73. Worcester1850, 11–12.

74. Ibid., 20–21.

75. Wendell Phillips, Shall Women Have the Right to Vote? Address by Wendell Phillips at Worcester, Mass, 1851 (Philadelphia: Equal Franchise Society of Pennsylvania, 1910), 8, National American Woman Suffrage Collection, Library of Congress.

76. Syracuse1852, 69.

77. Ibid., 15.

78. Ibid., 34.

79. Ibid., 30–34; Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Macmillan, 2010), 75.

80. Syracuse1852, 30.

81. Lucy Stone herself did refuse to pay taxes in 1857, after which her property was seized and auctioned off to cover the costs of her debt. McMillen reports that a “sympathetic neighbor purchased the items and allowed Lucy to buy them back.” McMillen, Seneca Falls, 128. R. Richard Geddes and Sharon Tennyson, “Passage of the Married Women’s Property Acts and Earnings Acts in the United States: 1850 to 1920,” in Research in Economic History, vol. 29, ed. Christopher Hanes and Susan Wolcott (Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2013), 153.

82. Syracuse1852, 46.

83. Ibid., 26.

84. Ibid.

85. On the evolution of republican motherhood see Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York: Norton, 1980).

86. Syracuse1852, 26.

87. On Nichols’s life and ideas see Marilyn S. Blackwell and Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel, Frontier Feminist: Clarina Howard Nichols and the Politics of Motherhood (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010).

88. Worcester1851, 64–65.

89. Ibid., 74.

90. On women’s rights activists’ critique and use of the family, see Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

91. Syracuse1852, 31.

92. Ibid., 73.

93. Ibid., 47. Rhode Island held a convention to alter its constitution in 1842. See chapter 1.

94. Worcester1850, 15.

95. Congress passed the Militia Act on July 17, 1862, but recruitment of black soldiers began in earnest in 1863, after the Emancipation Proclamation announced the army’s plan to accept African American men’s service. John David Smith, ed., Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 1–2.

96. On the connection between black men’s civil war military service and citizenship, see Christian G. Samito, Becoming American under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship during the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).

97. During the Civil War, African American activists held only one national convention, in October 1864, but groups in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kansas, and Louisiana held state-level conventions between 1863 and April 1865. Bell, Minutes; Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 1:137–170, 342–353; 2:230–239, 242–256.

98. “Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men, Held in the City of Syracuse, N. Y., October 4, 5, 6 and 7, 1864; with the Bill of Wrongs and Rights, and the Address to the American People,” page 24, in Bell, Minutes.

99. Ibid., 41–42.

100. The Dred Scott Decision: Opinion of Chief Justice Taney, with an Introduction by J. H. Van Evrie. Also, an Appendix, Containing an Essay on the Natural history of the Prognathous Race of Mankind, Originally Written for the New York Day-Book by Dr. S.A. Cartwright (New York: Van Evrie, Horton & Co., 1859), http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.law/llst.022.

101. “Proceedings of the State Equal Rights Convention, of the Colored People of Pennsylvania, Held in the city of Harrisburg, February 8th, 9th, and 10th, 1865, Together with a few of the Arguments Presented Suggesting the Necessity for Holding the Convention, and An Address of the Colored State Convention to the People of Pennsylvania,” in Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 1:140.

102. “Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men, held in the City of Syracuse,” pages 42–43, in Bell, Minutes.

103. “Proceedings of the State Equal Rights Convention, of the Colored People of Pennsylvania,” in Foner and Walker, Proceedings, 1:163.

104. “Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men, held in the City of Syracuse,” page 58, in Bell, Minutes.

105. Ibid., 24. To protest the unequal treatment of black soldiers, the convention passed a resolution asking Congress to ensure that there were no race-based distinctions among soldiers in assigning their pay, duties, and prospects for promotion.

106. Ibid., 33.

107. Ibid., 42.

108. Ibid., 60.

109. Although some women certainly did perform military service, they did so disguised as men. See Deanne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook, They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002); Elizabeth D. Leonard, All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies (New York: Norton, 1999). Northern women’s broad efforts to support the war in other ways were also later claimed by activists as state service. Nina Silber, Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

110. “Meeting of the Loyal Women of the Republic,” Papers: 1, 487–493. Loyal Leagues founded by northern women appeared in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Wendy Hamand Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 102.

111. Editorial Note, Papers: 1, 480–481. Appeal by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “To the Women of the Republic,” in Papers: 1, 483.

112. Stanton, “To the Women of the Republic,” in ibid., 483–486.

113. Susan B. Anthony to Amy Kirby Post, April 13, 1865, Papers: 1, 481. Venet notes that the composition of this group was mostly white, and that there is scant evidence that the Loyal League members actively recruited African American women and men. Venet, 110.

114. Susan B. Anthony, Address, “Meeting of the Loyal Women of the Republic,” Papers: 1, 491.

115. William Lloyd Garrison, The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, ed. Walter M. Merrill and Louis Ruchames, (Cambridge, MA: 1971–1981), 5:154, in Papers: 1, 488.

116. “Meeting of the Women’s Loyal National League,” Papers: 1, 498. The text of the petition that the league proposed to circulate was later attributed to the social reformer Robert Dale Owen, who would play a critical role in the drafting of the Fourteenth Amendment’s text two years later. Ibid., 499n2.

117. Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Alisse Theodore Portnoy, “‘Female Petitioners can Lawfully be Heard’: Negotiating Female Decorum, United States Politics, and Political Agency, 1829–1831,” Journal of the Early Republic 23, no. 4 (Winter 2003), 573–610.

118. Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets, 109–122.

119. Although the Senate never implemented an official gag rule, it did devise a complicated procedure by which it could avoid having to deal with antislavery petitions directly. When it received an antislavery petition, the Senate “would vote not on whether to receive the petition itself—this would dignify the petition—but on whether to accept the question of receiving the petition.” Senate Historical Office, “Senate History, March 16, 1836, Gag Rule,” https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Gag_Rule.htm. Much to the relief of its organizers, the Loyal League’s petition was dealt with directly. In a letter to Frances Miller Seward, the wife of Secretary of State William Seward, Stanton said, “Mr. Sumner presented the ‘emancipation petition’ last week, made a good little speech which called out some discussion & that the petition instead of being thrown under the table was referred.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Frances Miller Seward, February 15, 1864, Papers: 1, 510.

120. At least Stanton and Anthony later recalled this to be true in their History of Woman Suffrage. Despite the biased nature of this source, there was a significant correspondence between Sumner and both Stanton and Anthony in this period, and it is possible that he would have expressed his support for their efforts. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2, 1861–1876 (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1882), 50–89.

121. While antislavery petitioning aligned women’s rights activists with abolitionists in the pre-war period, the relationship was not easy. Venet notes, for example, that Stanton became quite angry when the American Anti-Slavery Society began a rival petition drive in 1863. Venet, 119–120.

122. Venet argues that the Loyal League helped shift women’s rights activism away from moral reform and toward political action. Ibid., 148–149. Pennsylvania congressman William D. Kelley spoke to the league, and Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson credited the league’s efforts as helping the antislavery cause in Congress. Ibid., 114, 122.

123. Ibid., 110; Congressional Globe, 38th Congress, 1st sess. 536 (February 9, 1864).

124. Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Caroline Healey Dall, May 7, 1864, Papers: 1, 519.

125. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Woman’s One Political Right—Circulate The Petition!,” The Liberator, December 18, 1863.

126. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Universal Suffrage,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, July 29, 1865, Papers: 1, 550.

127. The documents are scarce between August and December of 1865. In this period, Anthony was visiting her brother in Kansas, participating in political activities there, and then engaging in a speaking tour along her route back to the East. Between August and September she visited relatives and then returned home to Rochester. By October, she was traveling and visiting friends. Her diary indicates, however, that in the fall she spent a lot of time at the New York offices of the National Anti-Slavery Standard and the American Anti-Slavery Society, for which she was a paid lecturer. By December, though, her correspondence begins to discuss the petition campaign and to urge her friends to support and participate in the drive for petition signatures. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, ed. Patricia G. Holland and Ann D. Gordon (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1991), microfilm, ser. 3, reel 11 (hereafter cited as Papers: Microfilm).

128. By December of 1865, Anthony indicated in a letter to the well-respected Republican general Carl Schurz her belief that the only “right or safe basis of a republican government” was universal suffrage and implied that these ideas were held by others. In this letter Anthony asked Schurz to participate in a series of lectures she was organizing because “we believe you fully with us in the sentiment that the work of this hour is to establish a genuine republican government whose codes and constitutions shall be for persons, citizens, taxpayers, the governed—and not for race or color, sect or sex.” Susan B. Anthony to Carl Schurz, December 30, 1865, ibid., ser. 3, reel 11.

129. “The Anniversaries,” 8.

130. Wendell Phillips to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, January 14, 1866, Papers: Microfilm, ser. 3, reel 11.

131. Phillips, Shall Women Have the Right to Vote?, 14.

132. Lucy McKim married Wendell Phillips Garrison, the son of William Lloyd Garrison and the future editor of the Nation (1881–1906), on July 6, 1865. See “Across the Generations,” Garrison Family Tree, http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/atg/popupgarrisontree.html; Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Martha Coffin Pelham Wright, January 20, 1866, Papers: Microfilm, ser. 3, reel 11.

133. Lucretia Coffin Mott to Martha Coffin Wright, November 2, 1865, Papers: 1, 558n1.

3. The Family Politic

1. U.S. Const. art. I, § 2. For discussion of the history of the Three-Fifths Compromise see Staughton Lynd, “Compromise of 1787,” Political Science Quarterly 81, no. 2 (Jun., 1966), 225–250; Howard Ohline, “Republicanism and Slavery: Origins of the Three-Fifths Clause in the United States Constitution,” William and Mary Quarterly 28, no. 4 (October 1971): 563–584; Jack N. Rakove, “The Great Compromise: Ideas, Interests, and the Politics of Constitution Making,” William and Mary Quarterly 44, no. 3 (July 1987): 424–457; George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

2. Congressional Globe, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 356 (January 22, 1866) (hereafter cited as CG).

3. Congress’s focus was on the metaphor of the political family of Americans. Historians have noted that the changes brought by the war and emancipation prompted many other Americans to reevaluate, re-create, or newly construct the idea of, legal meanings for, and lived experience of family. Some examples: Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Peter W. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Noralee Frankel, Freedom’s Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Elizabeth Ann Regosin, Freedom’s Promise: Ex-Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002); Amy Murrell Taylor, The Divided Family in Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

4. The Thirty-Eighth Congress ended on March 3, 1865, and the Thirty-Ninth Congress did not begin until December 4, 1865. See “Session Dates of Congress,” http://history.house.gov/Institution/Session-Dates/30–39. Most states elected their representatives in even-numbered years, but congressional sessions in the Civil War era began in December of odd-numbered years. Those congressmen elected in 1864 were not seated in Congress until well over a year after their election. Congressional Directory, “Sessions of Congress Table,” 2, http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/congresses1.pdf. See also Congressional Quarterly, Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to United States Elections, 3rd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1994).

5. In initial meetings with the new president, radicals persuaded themselves that Johnson’s goals were aligned with their own. See Joseph B. James, The Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), 5–8; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 176–178, 180–185, 197; Eric L. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 61–67. Identifying and defining radicals, moderates, and conservatives among Republicans in the Civil War era have long occupied historians. See Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Allan G. Bogue, The Earnest Men: Republicans of the Civil War Senate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); Allan G. Bogue, The Congressman’s Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Michael Les Benedict, A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863–1869 (New York: Norton, 1974); Herman Belz, A New Birth of Freedom: The Republican Party and Freedman’s Rights, 1861 to 1866 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976). I follow Eric Foner’s definition of radicals as those Republicans who “shared the conviction that slavery and the rights of black Americans were the preeminent question facing nineteenth-century America.” Foner, “The Ideology of the Republican Party,” in The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republicans’ First Generation, ed. Robert Francis Engs and Randall M. Miller (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 17.

6. For example, see Salmon P. Chase to Charles Sumner, June 25, 1865. “President Johnson makes a great mistake in refusing to recognize the colored citizens as part of the people with which, in each state, he thinks himself not only authorized but bound to arrange the conditions of restoration. It is a moral, political, & financial mistake.… I am grievously disappointed.” Salmon P. Chase, The Salmon P. Chase Papers, ed. John Niven (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998), 5:55–56. On Johnson’s reconstruction plans see McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction, esp. chap. 6; Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1989).

7. Charles Sumner to Francis Lieber, December 3, 1865, cited in James, Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment, 38.

8. James, Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment, 7–15.

9. Ibid., 37–38.

10. “From Washington,” New York Times, December 3, 1865, 1.

11. The House and the Senate referred to this committee in different ways. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to it either as the Joint Committee on Reconstruction (rather than the Senate’s “Joint Committee to Enquire into the Condition of the States Which Formed the So-Called Federal States of America”) or as the Joint Committee of Fifteen (as it was called in the House). James, Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment, 37–39.

12. Raoul Berger, The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 23–25; Robert J. Kaczorowski, “To Begin the Nation Anew: Congress, Citizenship, and Civil Rights after the Civil War,” American Historical Review 92, no. 1 (February 1987): 55–58. See also the speech of Senator Lyman Trumbull, Republican from Illinois, CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 474–476 (January 29, 1866).

13. In Congress, constitutional amendments, bills, and resolutions were proposed by Representatives Thaddeus Stevens and John Bingham and by Massachusetts radical senators Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 10, 14, 18 (December 6, 11, 1866); Journal of the Senate of the United States of America, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 5–8, 38 (December 4, 13, 1865) (hereafter cited as Senate: Journal). For a discussion of Bingham’s importance in the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment, see Erving E. Beauregard, Bingham of the Hills: Politician and Diplomat Extraordinary (New York: P. Lang, 1989).

14. For more on Trumbull, see Horace White, The Life of Lyman Trumbull (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913); Mark M. Krug, Lyman Trumbull: Conservative Radical (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1965).

15. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 211 (January 12, 1866).

16. Both the Senate bill and the Fugitive Slave Act had the same number of enforcement provisions organized in the same manner. Each explicitly declared that the courts and their officers were required by law to uphold the provisions of the act. Kaczorowski, “To Begin the Nation Anew,” 59.

17. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction, 277–278; Senate: Journal, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 72 (January 11, 1866).

18. Senate: Journal, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 132 (February 2, 1866); Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 225, 232 (February 3, 5, 1866) (hereafter cited as House: Journal).

19. House: Journal, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 396–397 (March 13, 1866). On House procedure preceding the passage of Senate Bill 61, see Earl M. Maltz, Civil Rights, the Constitution, and Congress, 1863–1869 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 64–67.

20. Senate: Journal, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 235–237 (March 15, 1866).

21. Ibid., 270–289 (March 27, 1866). For a discussion of President Johnson’s relationship with the radical and moderate Republicans, and of how central the Freedman’s Bureau and Civil Rights Act vetoes were to the alienation of Republicans who had originally sought good relations with Johnson, see McKitrick , Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction, 274–325.

22. Senate: Journal, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 317 (April 6, 1866); House: Journal, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 528 (April 9, 1866).

23. Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 71–72; Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), esp. chaps. 2 and 4; Alfred Avins, The Reconstruction Amendments’ Debates: The Legislative History and Contemporary Debates in Congress on the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments (Richmond: Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government, 1967), 70–74.

24. For example, a report in the New York Tribune of June 1865 stated, “[A] committee of negroes… recently called on [President Johnson] to petition the next Congress to grant them the right of franchise in this District, as preliminary to its concession elsewhere.” Reprinted in The Daily Journal (Ogdensburg, New York), June 9, 1865.

25. CG, 37th Cong., 2nd sess. 1686 (April 16, 1862). On early Republican wartime emancipation efforts, see James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: Norton, 2013), 240–292.

26. See the arguments of Republicans Glenni Scofield of Pennsylvania on January 10 and of Burt Van Horn of New York on January 17, 1866. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 179, 285 (January 10 and 17, 1866). For Washington, D.C., as a test case for radical Republican policies, see Robert Harrison, “An Experimental Station for Lawmaking: Congress and the District of Columbia, 1862–1878,” Civil War History 53, no. 1 (March 2007): 29–53; and Masur, An Example for All the Land, 1.

27. Masur, An Example for All the Land, 131–133.

28. Petitions were received in favor of black suffrage in the District on December 11 and 21, 1865; January 16, 19, 22, and 23, 1866. All were presented by Henry Wilson, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, and Benjamin Wade of Ohio. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 16, 107, 242, 312, 337, 360 (1865–1866). The lead signature on the December 11 petition was that of John Francis Cook, a prominent minister and leader in black Washington. On the petition campaign see Lois E. Horton, “The Days of Jubilee: Black Migration during the Civil War and Reconstruction,” and James Oliver Horton, “The Genesis of Washington’s African American Community,” in Urban Odyssey: A Multicultural History of Washington, D.C., ed. Francine Curro Cary (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 20–41, 65–78. Also useful is Allan Johnston, Surviving Freedom: The Black Community of Washington, D.C. 1860–1880 (New York: Garland, 1993). In addition to petitions, the African American community also used less official channels to pressure Congress to pass suffrage in Washington. The petition itself did not claim that manhood entitled African Americans to vote, but rather it relied on ideas of universal equality. Masur, An Example for All the Land, 133. It stated, “We, the Colored Citizens of the District of Columbia… are property holders… [and] pay no inconsiderable amount of taxes.… Our loyalty has never been questioned; our patriotism is unbounded.… Without the right of suffrage, we are without protection and liable to combinations of outrage.… These principles and considerations are the basis upon which we predicate our claim for suffrage, and civil equality before the law.” Petition of Colored Citizens of the District of Columbia, Praying the Passage of an Act Allowing them the Right of Suffrage, (endorsed December 11, 1865); Committee on the District of Columbia, Petitions—Memorials, (Sen39A-H4); 39th Congress; Records of the United States Senate, Record Group 46, National Archives, Washington D.C.

29. New York Daily Tribune, July 11, 1865, 4.

30. Journals of the Council of the City of Washington, 63rd council, 313–316, Washington, D.C., 1864–1871, cited in Green, Secret City, 76–78. In Georgetown, 812 people voted against black suffrage, 1 in favor. The mayor of Georgetown, in a letter to the president pro tempore of the Senate, stated, “I am… directed to state that the average vote at the four preceding annual elections for officers of our City Government was 541 being 270 less votes than were polled on the 28th.” Henry Addison to Lafayette Foster, January 12, 1866 (endorsed January 13, 1866); Henry Addison to Lafayette Foster, January 12, 1866, (endorsed January 13, 1866); Committee on the District of Columbia, Petitions and Memorials Referred to Committees, (Sen39AH4); 39th Congress; Records of the Senate; Record Group 46, National Archives, Washington D.C.

31. For example, see the argument of James F. Wilson, chair of the Judiciary Committee and original author of the text of the bill. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 174–175 (January 10, 1865). See also Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 317n91.

32. For exactly how little northern support there was for black suffrage, see Phyllis Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); and Emil Olbrich, The Development of Sentiment on Negro Suffrage to 1860, Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin No. 477, History Series, vol. 3, no. 1 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1912).

33. The 1857 Wisconsin referendum was problematic—it received not even one-third of the total votes of the number who voted for governor in the same election. Because the question was acted upon by fewer than ten thousand voters, it was challenged in court and not enforced until the state’s supreme court decided in 1866 to allow it. Olbrich , Development of Sentiment, 77, 86, 89, 90, 98; Field , Politics of Race, 1–79; Wang, Trial of Democracy, 2–7; William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 27; Robert R. Dykstra, Bright Radical Star: Black Freedom and White Supremacy on the Hawkeye Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) 173–191.

34. Hanes Walton, Sherman C. Puckett, and Donald Richard Deskins, The African American Electorate: A Statistical History (Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press, 2012), 1:147, table 8.1; Wang, Trial of Democracy, 22. For a comprehensive discussion of the African American suffrage referenda between 1846 and 1870, see Walton, Puckett, and Deskins, African American Electorate, vol. 1, 145–160. Black suffrage garnered 44.83 percent of total votes in Connecticut, 46.72 percent of votes in Wisconsin, and 45.12 percent in Minnesota. Defeats in the District and in the territory of Colorado were a little more dramatic, with only 1.01 percent voting for black suffrage in Colorado and only 36 favorable out of 7,369 total votes in Washington and Georgetown. Gillette, Right to Vote, 25–26.

35. Senate: Journal, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 5 (December 4, 1865); House: Journal, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 32 (December 5, 1865).

36. Committee minutes, Committee on the Judiciary, 89–92, Docket Volume (39A–F13.13), 39th Congress, Records of the United States House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives; CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 72 (December 18, 1865); 302–311 (January 18, 1865).

37. House: Journal, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 166–167 (January 18, 1866).

38. Senate: Journal, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 5, 70, 76, 82, 86, 180 (December 4, 1865; January 10, 12, 15–16, 1866; February 21, 1866).

39. Ibid., 582, 584 (June 27, 1866); Wang , Trial of Democracy, 28–33. African American men in Washington were not enfranchised until January 8, 1867, when the Congress overrode President Andrew Johnson’s veto of the measure. Senate: Journal, 39th Cong., 2nd sess. 77 (January 8, 1867).

40. Enfranchising southern African American men was also attractive because it empowered the formerly enslaved population to pursue its own reconstruction and addressed the increasing demands emerging from the African American community for universal suffrage. On race, suffrage and reconstruction see Foner, Reconstruction; and Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men; W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998 [1935]); On Republican Party politics in the Civil War era, see Bogue, Congressman’s Civil War and Earnest Men; Benedict, Compromise of Principle; David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); and Hans Trefousse, The Radical Republicans: Lincoln’s Vanguard for Racial Justice (New York: Knopf, 1968).

41. James , Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment, 58–67.

42. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 351 (January 22, 1866). A more detailed discussion of House Resolution 51 and representation appears in chapter 5.

43. Extensive debates among antislavery activists in the antebellum period about the nature of the Constitution as a proslavery or antislavery document did not resolve the paradoxical relationship between slavery, the Constitution, and the founding fathers. William Lloyd Garrison, “On the Constitution and the Union,” Liberator, December 29, 1832, cited in William E. Cain, ed., William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight against Slavery: Selections from The Liberator (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 87–88; Frederick Douglass, “The Constitution of the United States: Is it Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery? Speech Delivered in Glasgow, Scotland, March 26, 1860,” in Douglass, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1950); Lysander Spooner, Unconstitutionality of Slavery (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1845); Wendell Phillips, “Address of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society to the Friends of Freedom and Emancipation in the United States,” in The Constitution: A Pro-Slavery Compact; or, Extracts from the Madison Papers, etc. Selected by Wendell Phillips, 3rd ed., ed. Wendell Phillips (Boston: Andrews & Prentiss, 1856), courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

44. On nineteenth-century middle-class whites’ definitions of masculinity see Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996); Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Michael Kimmel, The History of Men: Essays on the History of American and British Masculinities (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005). For an interesting account of how gender enabled earlier politicians to create the American state, see Mark E. Kann, A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered Language, and Patriarchal Politics (New York: NYU Press, 1998).

45. From Aristotle to the early modern European political philosophers, the organization of the family was envisioned as a model for the state. Mary Beth Norton argues that in colonial America, the family was “the real—not just metaphorical—foundation of the state.” Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Knopf, 1996), 38. See also Carole Shammas, A History of Household Government in America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), esp. 2–4. In the European context see Rachel Judith Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family, and Political Argument in England, 1680–1714 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Julia Adams, “The Rule of the Father: Patriarchy and Patrimonialism in Early Modern Europe,” in Max Weber’s Economy and Society: A Critical Companion, ed. Charles Camic, Philip S. Gorski, and David M. Trubek (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 237–266; Su Fang Ng, Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, “Family Metaphors: The Language of an Independence Revolution,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 25, no. 1 (1983): 154–180.

46. Masculinity is, of course, a mutable category being constantly re-created over time and endowed with multiple meanings at any given moment. Some of the many works that engage this fluidity are: Paul Smith, Boys: Masculinities in Contemporary Culture (New York: Harper Collins, 1998); Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). The problem of multiple masculinities was raised for me by Anne McClintock, “Masculinities and Other War Zones” (talk delivered at Crossing Boundaries/Shifting Boundaries, Graduate Student Conference, Department of French and Italian, University of Wisconsin, April 12, 2002).

47. Interpreting the founders’ intent has been a central component of American constitutional law. See Leonard W. Levy, Original Intent and the Framers’ Constitution (New York: Macmillan, 1988); Herman Belz, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter Albert, eds., To Form a More Perfect Union: The Critical Ideas of the Constitution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992); Jack N. Rakove, ed., Interpreting the Constitution: The Debate over Original Intent (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990); and Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Knopf, 1996).

48. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 765 (February 9, 1866).

49. Ibid., 353 (January 22, 1866).

50. Ibid., 458 (January 26, 1866)

51. Ibid., 1415 (March 15, 1866). Although Davis was elected as a Whig to fill the vacancy of John C. Breckenridge in 1861, in 1867 he was reelected as a Democrat. Given this fact, and the consistency of his language with racist Democratic Party rhetoric, I am grouping him with the Democrats for the purposes of this discussion. “Biographical Directory of Congress, 1774–present,” United States Congress, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=D000099.

52. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 458 (January 26, 1866). The 1860 edition of Webster’s dictionary defined “patriarchal” as “belonging to patriarchs, possessed by patriarchs.” It defined “patriarch” as “the father and ruler of a family; one who governs by paternal right.” Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, ed., rev., and enlarged Chauncy A. Goodrich (Springfield, MA: George and Charles Merriam, 1860).

53. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 387 (January 23, 1866).

54. Ibid., 412 (January 24, 1866).

55. Ibid., 1112 (March 1, 1866).

56. Ibid., 387 (January 23, 1866)

57. Ibid., 355 (January 22, 1866).

58. Ibid., 459 (January 26, 1866).

59. Ibid., 882 (February 16, 1866).

60. Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). The Democratic Party relied most heavily on “ethnoreligious outsiders” and recent immigrant groups for its constituency and therefore reinforced the potency of race to unite its disparate members as Democrats through whiteness. See Joel H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 164. For a discussion of how immigrant groups and workers utilized whiteness to construct self-identity see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Clas s (New York: Verso, 1991); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Matthew Frye Jacobsen, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

61. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 575 (February 1, 1866).

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid., 176 (January 10, 1866).

64. Ibid., 118 (December 21, 1866).

65. Ibid., 880 (February 16, 1866).

66. See ibid., 178, 201 (January 10 and 11, 1866) and 246 (January 16, 1866). The black rapist was also a trope frequently adopted by Democrats to reject the enfranchisement of African American men, and its use undoubtedly contributed to the construction of the black rapist myth that emerged during Reconstruction. Diane Miller Sommerville argues that this myth gained legitimacy in the postwar period as a racist response to the political empowerment of black men. See Sommerville, “The Rape Myth in the Old South Reconsidered,” in A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men’s History and Masculinity, vol. 1, ed. Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 438–472, and esp. 439–442. See also Diane Miller Sommerville, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

67. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 448–449 (January 26, 1866).

68. Ibid., 355 (January 22, 1866).

69. Ibid., 766 (February 9, 1866).

70. Ibid., 769.

71. Ibid.

72. Ibid., 876 (February 16, 1866).

73. Ibid., 764 (February 9, 1866).

74. Ibid., 435 (January 25, 1866).

75. Quoted in James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 98–99; Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Norton, 1998), 326–327. On other abolitionists’ more friendly perspective on the Constitution, see John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

76. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 384 (January 23, 1866).

77. Ibid., 832 (February 14, 1866).

78. Ibid., 1181 (March 5, 1866).

79. Ibid., 682 (February 6, 1866).

80. Ibid., 536 (January 31, 1866).

81. Petition of Colored People in Georgia for the Elective Franchise, &c., (endorsed January 30, 1866); Committee on the Judiciary, Petitions—Civil Rights (HR 39A–H14.2); 39th Congress; Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives, Washington D.C.

82. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 180 (January 10, 1886).

83. Ibid., 684–685 (February 6, 1866).

84. To the Honorable Senate and House of Representatives of the United States, in Congress Assembled, from William Nesbit, Joseph C. Bustill, William D. Forten on Behalf of the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League, February 20, 1866; Committee on the Judiciary, Petitions—Civil Rights (HR 39A–H14.2) 39th Congress; Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives, Washington D.C.

85. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 536 (January 31, 1866). Webster’s 1860 dictionary defined “parricide” as “1. A person who murders his father or mother. 2. One who murders an ancestor, or anyone to whom he owes reverence.” Webster, American Dictionary of the English Language.

86. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 674 (February 6, 1866).

87. Ibid., 1226 (March 7, 1866).

88. To the Honorable Senate and House of Representatives of the United States, in Congress Assembled, from William Nesbit, Joseph C. Bustill, William D. Forten.

89. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 410 (January 24, 1866).

90. Ibid., 1183 (March 5, 1866).

91. Ibid., 1231 (March 7, 1866).

92. Ibid., 1074 (February 28, 1866). Sumner’s references to giving birth and nursing could also be read as maternal.

93. On the connections between the wartime service of African American men and post–Civil War rights policies see Mary Frances Berry, Military Necessity and Civil Rights Policy: Black Citizenship and the Constitution, 1861–1868 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1977); Belz, New Birth of Freedom; and more recently Christian G. Samito, Becoming American under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship during the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).

94. By emphasizing the military service of African American men during the Civil War, Republicans, like antebellum and wartime African American activists, drew on the history in America in which the disfranchised were granted voting rights in exchange for their military service. Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy, 1760–1860 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 79–82.

95. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 310 (January 18, 1866).

96. Ibid., 259 (January 16, 1866).

97. Ibid., 175 (January 10, 1866).

98. Ibid., 1225 (March 7, 1866).

99. Petition of Colored Citizens of the District of Columbia, Praying the Passage of an Act Allowing Them the Right of Suffrage, (endorsed December 11, 1865); Committee on the District of Columbia, Petitions—Memorials, (Sen39A–H4); 39th Congress; Records of the United States Senate, Record Group 46, National Archives, Washington D.C.

100. Petition of Colored People in Georgia for the Elective Franchise.

101. To the Honorable Senate and House of Representatives of the United States, in Congress Assembled, from William Nesbit, Joseph C. Bustill, William D. Forten.

102. Ibid.

103. Petition of Colored Citizens of the District of Columbia.

4. The Rights of Men

1. Josiah Grinnell was a two-term Republican representative from Iowa. An unremarkable congressman, he later gained fame as the founder of Grinnell College and the town of Grinnell, Iowa. “Biographical Directory of Congress, 1774–present,” United States Congress, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=G000478.

2. Neither Republican nor Democrat, Rousseau was elected as an Unconditional Unionist, but his extremely conservative opinions on race-based issues more frequently aligned with the Democratic members of the House than with Republicans. “Biographical Directory of Congress, United States Congress, 1774–1961, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=R000468.

3. Congressional Globe, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 3818–3819 (July 14 1866) (hereafter cited as CG); Josiah Bushnell Grinnell, Men and Events of Forty Years: Autobiographical Reminiscences of an Active Career From 1850 to 1890 (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1891), 163–170.

4. For an analysis of the Sumner incident see David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 1960); more recently, Williamjames Hull Hoffer, The Caning of Charles Sumner: Honor, Idealism, and the Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

5. Gender was also a prominent element in Brooks’s attack on Sumner and in the public’s response to the incident. See Manisha Sinha, “The Caning of Charles Sumner: Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War,” Journal of the Early Republic 23, no. 2 (2003): 251–252.

6. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 3096 (June 11, 1866).

7. John Lyde Wilson, governor of South Carolina (1822–24), published a code duello in 1838 outlining the procedures for duels between southern gentlemen. In it he justified dueling as a natural defense of one’s manhood and honor when no other mode of redress for an insult was available. “When one finds himself avoided in society, his friends shunning his approach, his substance wasting, his wife and children in want around him, and traces all his misfortunes and misery to the slanderous tongue of the calumniator, who, by secret whisper or artful innuendo, has sapped and undermined his reputation, he must be more or less than man to submit in silence.… [Dueling] will be persisted in as long as a manly independence, and a lofty personal pride in all that dignifies and ennobles the human character, shall continue to exist.” John Lyde Wilson, The Code of Honor, (Or, Rules for the Government of Principles and Seconds in Dueling) (Project Gutenberg, 1838, 2013), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6085/6085-h/6085-h.htm. For a discussion of the relationship of violence, and especially dueling, to southern male culture see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). On the connections of physical violence to nineteenth-century constructions of masculinity see Elliott Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). On the connections between gender roles and sectional conflict, see Catherine Clinton, “Sex and the Sectional Conflict,” in Taking Off the White Gloves: Southern Women and Women Historians, ed. Michele K. Gillespie and Catherine Clinton (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 46–63.

8. The Speaker of the House and the president of the Senate had signed House Resolution 127, enrolled the resolution as passed by both the House and Senate, and sent it to the secretary of state for distribution to the various states for ratification. Journal of the Senate of the United States of America, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 523, 527 (June 15, 1866); Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States Congress, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 841 (June 14, 1866).

9. Although the notion of separate spheres represented an ideal that many middle-class white families were told to expect, some historians’ work has indicated that there were distinct limits to the public/private dichotomy. These are shown particularly clearly in the many works that focus on women’s involvement in the public world of politics and those that explore men’s involvement in the private world of the family. An excellent article critiquing the separate spheres model is Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (June 1988): 9–39.

10. On the development of interconnections between family and political community in American conceptualizations of power, see Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society, (New York: Knopf, 1996).

11. Stephen M. Frank has found that until 1870 this shift in the focus of men’s work lives did not necessarily translate into less time within the household, as many men worked from the home or quite near the home. However, he acknowledges that there was a cultural shift in the way that men’s presence in the household was perceived. Frank, Life with Father: Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth Century North (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 55–72.

12. Nancy Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States, 1830–1934,” American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (December 1998): 1452n33; Toby Ditz, “Ownership and Obligation: Inheritance and Patriarchal Households in Connecticut, 1750–1820,” William and Mary Quarterly 47, no. 2 (April 1990): 235–265.

13. On the evolution of coverture in nineteenth-century marriage law, see Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 2–55.

14. Cited in Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity From the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 133.

15. On marriage and eighteenth-century politics see Mark E. Kann, A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered Language, and Patriarchal Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 79–104.

16. Rotundo, American Manhood, 115; Ruth H. Bloch, “Inside and Outside the Public Sphere,” William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 1 (January 2005): 99–106.

17. “Marriage and Divorce,” Southern Quarterly Review 26 (1854): 351, cited in Cott, Public Vows, 7.

18. Kann, Republic of Men, 15–16. Dana Nelson argues in her book National Manhood that this fraternity, created with the advent of universal manhood suffrage, mitigated against other modes of alignment between men. She argues that this alignment was particularly detrimental to the possibility of alliances among men with common class and economic interests, to individual men’s self-identification, and to the American democracy. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

19. Cited in Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 260.

20. See chapter 1.

21. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 11–42.

22. Ibid., 36–39.

23. Rotundo, American Manhood, 167–180.

24. Although women participated in electoral politics in the antebellum period, they did not cast ballots, rendering the ritual act of voting itself a gendered behavior. The relationship between manhood and American politics has been examined in the context of American expansionist policies in the antebellum period in Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For the link between manhood and expansion in the later nineteenth century, see Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

25. See chapter 1.

26. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 464 (January 27, 1866).

27. Ibid., 379 (January 23, 1866).

28. Ibid., 1181 (March 5, 1866).

29. Ibid., 570 (February 1, 1866). The term “negro” was not capitalized in the Congressional Globe in this period. Here I follow the capitalization practice of the original source.

30. Ibid., 682 (February 6, 1866).

31. Ibid., 356 (January 22, 1866).

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid., 430 (January 25, 1866).

36. Ibid., 1255 (March 8, 1866).

37. In the process, congressmen envisioned the default emancipated person as male, equating freedman with man and marginalizing African American women in their discussions of freedmen’s rights.

38. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 356 (January 22, 1866).

39. Ibid., 739 (February 8, 1866).

40. Ibid., 570 (February 1, 1866).

41. Ibid., 742 (February 8, 1866); 1182 (March 5, 1866).

42. Gender played a particularly important role in these definitions. See Rosemarie Zagarri, “The Rights of Man and Woman in Post-Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly 55, no. 2 (1998): 203–230.

43. This did not mean, however, that enslaved people did not forge strong and meaningful familial relationships despite the numerous institutional barriers to those connections.

44. Kristin Hoganson, “Garrisonian Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Gender, 1850–1860,” American Quarterly 45, no. 4 (1993), 558–595.

45. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 504 (January 30, 1866).

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid., 1266 (March 8, 1866).

48. Ibid., 1182 (March 5, 1866).

49. Senator Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania argued that the Thirteenth Amendment did not offer justification for the Civil Rights Act because it did not disrupt all dependent relationships, only the very specific liberation of the slave from the master. He contended that it did not change the “involuntary servitude of my child to me, of my apprentice to me, or the quasi-servitude which the wife to some extent owes to her husband.” Ibid., 499 (January 30, 1866).

50. Ibid.,505.

51. Although his approach was unusual, Johnson was not alone in identifying white men marrying black women as a potential source of racial intermarriage. In response to some of the Democrats’ concerns, Lyman Trumbull mockingly declared that he “supposed that at his [Kentucky senator Davis’s] time of life he would feel protected against [amalgamation] without any law to put him in the penitentiary if he should commit it.” Davis then pointed to Illinois, Trumbull’s home state, as a northern state with anti-interracial marriage laws. Trumbull replied that the presence of so many southerners in Illinois had required the law. This exchange indicated that some members of Congress were aware that historically the source of amalgamation, or miscegenation, in the South was white men’s interaction with black women, not black men’s connections with white women. Ibid., 600 (February 2, 1866).

52. Ibid., 604.

53. Ibid., 1679–1680 (March 27, 1866); 1757 (April 4, 1866).

54. Martha Elizabeth Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 144–148.

55. Toby Ditz also situates control over women’s sexuality at the heart of male power in “The New Men’s History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power: Some Remedies from Early American Gender History,” Gender and History 16, no. 1 (2004): 1–35, 11.

56. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 598 (February 2, 1866).

57. Ibid., 1155 (March 2, 1866).

58. Interestingly, in the next paragraph of his speech Eldridge infantilized African Americans, perhaps to appeal to the majority Republicans: “It is said that the negro race is weak and feeble; that they are mere children—‘wards of the government’” (ibid.). He implied that therefore they might need a weaker punishment for some crimes until education shall equalize their situation. The juxtaposition of the violent black rapist and the childlike innocent in this speech seems incongruous to the modern reader, but it was typical of white racist rhetoric at the time.

59. On the very real rapes committed by white men on black women in the Reconstruction-era South and the connection between sexual violence, gender, and citizenship, see Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South, Gender and American Culture Series (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

60. Amy Dru Stanley offers an excellent analysis of the relationship between marriage and contract for the emancipated in From Bondage to Contract. Although she carefully considers the ways that Congress, American culture, and the freedmen themselves conceptualized the marriage contract, she does not explicitly tie the right of contract to manhood. Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

61. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 475 (January 29, 1866).

62. Ibid., 476.

63. Ibid., 1151–1152 (March 2, 1866).

64. Ibid., 263 (January 16, 1866).

65. Ibid., 1118 (March 1, 1866).

66. On the evolution of married women’s property rights in the nineteenth century, see Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Richard H. Chused, “Married Women’s Property Law: 1800–1850,” Georgetown Law Journal 71 (1982): 1359–1425; Carole Shammas, “Re-Assessing the Married Women’s Property Acts,” Journal of Women’s History 6, no. 1 (1994): 9–30; Joan Hoff, Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women (New York: NYU Press, 1991).

67. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 1781–1782 (April 5, 1866).

68. Ibid., 1782.

69. Ibid., 506 (January 30, 1866).

70. Ibid., 1416 (March 15, 1866).

71. Ibid.

72. Ibid., 1271 (March 8, 1866).

73. Ibid., 382 (January 23, 1866).

74. Ibid.

75. See, for example, Pennsylvania Representative Benjamin Boyer’s speech on January 10, 1866. Ibid., 178.

76. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 478 (January 29, 1866).

77. Ibid., 606 (February 2, 1866).

78. Ibid., 1182 (March 5, 1866).

79. Ibid., 204 (January 11, 1866).

80. Ibid., 304 (January 18, 1866).

81. Ibid., 174 (January 10, 1866).

82. Ibid.

83. Ibid., 256 (January 16, 1866).

84. Ibid., 180 (January 10, 1866).

85. Ibid., 727 (February 7, 1866).

86. Ibid., 834 (February 14, 1866).

87. Ibid.

88. Ibid., 2462 (May 8, 1866).

89. Linda Kerber has argued that it is the right to serve the state that truly constitutes the differences in the legal status of men and women. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998); Kerber, “May All Our Citizens Be Soldiers and All Our Soldiers Citizens: The Ambiguities of Female Citizenship in the New Nation,” in Women, Militarism, and War: Essays in History, Politics, and Social Theory, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Sheila Tobias (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990), 89–104.

90. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 832 (February 14, 1866).

91. Ibid., 685 (February 6, 1866).

92. Ibid., 833 (February 14, 1866).

93. Ibid., 1159 (March 2, 1866).

94. Ibid.

95. Ibid., 1256 (March 8, 1866).

96. Although most suffrage arguments sounded like this, Kansas representative Samuel Pomeroy offered a depiction of black southern men at odds with these portrayals. Arguing that southern states should not benefit from the representation of the emancipated, Pomeroy asked if the black man was denied the right to vote, “What kind of compensation is that for all his long years of fidelity to our old flag? What an answer to his earnest prayers for his freedom and our triumph! What a reward for his faithful nursing and kind treatment of our Union soldiers and prisoners!” Ibid., 1182 (March 5, 1866). This image of a faithful, submissive, religious African American was more consistent with proslavery rhetoric than with the emergent manhood language other prosuffrage Republicans were using. It emphasized a more nurturing and feminized kind of service to the political community. Pomeroy was not alone in making these kinds of arguments. Depictions of African American men as feminized, vulnerable, and in need of protection from the state were also a strain of argument more broadly present in public discourse about enfranchisement. But I have found that in the Thirty-Ninth Congress these arguments occurred less frequently than those emphasizing the manhood rights of emancipated men.

97. Ibid., 284 (January 17, 1866).

98. Ibid., 181 (January 10, 1866).

99. Ibid., 832 (February 14, 1866).

100. Ibid., 308 (January 18, 1866).

101. Ibid., 833 (February 14, 1866).

102. Ibid., 832

103. Ibid., 685 (February 6, 1866).

104. Ibid., 1231 (March 7, 1866).

105. Ibid., 833 (February 14, 1866).

106. Ibid., 205 (January 11, 1866).

107. Ibid., 256 (January 16, 1866).

5. That Word “Male”

1. Susan B. Anthony Diary, December 11–26, 1865, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, In the School of Anti-Slavery, ed. Ann D. Gordon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 562 (hereafter cited as Papers: 1). Both the New York Times and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported cold and clear weather December 23–24 for New Yorkers heading to the area skating ponds. “The Holiday Season,” New York Times, December 23, 1865; “Skating. The Ball Up. The Christmas Carnival,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 23, 1865.

2. Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Gerrit Smith, January 1, 1866, Papers: 1, 568–569.

3. See Chapter 2.

4. Petition of Fifty Women Asking for an Amendment to the Constitution that Shall Prohibit the Several States from Disfranchising any of their Citizens on the Grounds of Sex, (February 14, 1866); Committee on the Judiciary, Petitions and Memorials—Woman Suffrage, (HR 39A–H14.9); 39th Congress; Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives, Washington DC.

5. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Legislation against Women,” Independent, January 25, 1866; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Political Rights of Women,” Liberator, December 29, 1865; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone, “A Petition for Universal Suffrage,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, December 30, 1865, in Stanton and Anthony, Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, ed. Patricia G. Holland and Ann D. Gordon (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1991), microfilm, ser. 3, reel 11 (hereafter cited as Papers: Microfilm); Susan B. Anthony to Caroline Healey Dall, December 26, 1865, Papers: 1, 562–563.

6. Petition of 100 Ladies of Philadelphia, Jefferson County, NY, in Favor of a Constitutional Amd. Granting Suffrage to Women, (February 10, 1866). Committee on the Judiciary, Petitions and Memorials—Woman Suffrage, (HR 39A–H14.9); 39th Congress; Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives, Washington DC.

7. Susan B. Anthony to Wendell Phillips, January 28, 1866, Papers: 1, 574.

8. It is difficult to label the advocates of woman suffrage at this time. Prior to the late 1860s, women engaged in gender-equity activism were understood to be “women’s rights” activists. After the 1860s, as the movement’s focus shifted from broader civil, property, and social equality to focus on achieving the franchise, its activists became known as “suffragists.” Because 1866 was a transitional year, I will refer to the proponents of woman suffrage as woman suffrage activists or advocates as well as suffragists.

9. Editorial, New York Tribune, May 26, 1865. “Manhood suffrage” was the most accurate term used to describe what was also called “universal suffrage” or “negro suffrage,” the expansion of the franchise to include all African American men.

10. “The President’s Plan,” Harper’s Weekly, June 10, 1865. For a discussion of the political leanings of Harper’s Weekly, see http://www.harpweek.com/02About/about.asp.

11. It is also interesting to note here that the editorial did not use the term “citizen,” which the Dred Scott decision had deemed could not apply to African Americans. This would be remedied in the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment.

12. “The Great Struggle,” Harper’s Weekly, August 19, 1865.

13. Anthony Diary, August 4, 1865, Papers: 1, 552.

14. Wendell Phillips to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, between January 9 and 12, 1866, in Papers: Microfilm, ser. 3, reel 11.

15. See Stanton, Universal Suffrage National Anti-Slavery Standard, July 29, 1865, Papers: 1, 550–551. Prior to the start of the congressional session, the suffragists’ correspondence reveals that they had not necessarily formed any particular plan for getting women’s rights included in the Republican congressional agenda. More frequently they mentioned continuing the state-level activism that had characterized their prewar work. On Friday, October 13, 1865, Anthony wrote in her diary that she and Lucretia Mott had met with a New York politician, Democrat Andrew J. Colvin, to discuss the “work for Women’s Right to suffrage in N.Y.” and to strategize for the forthcoming state legislative session. Papers: 1, 557.

16. Both proposals were referred to the Committee on the Judiciary. Schenck’s resolution was discussed and postponed, perhaps in favor of other plans being considered by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. The committee asked to be discharged from considering Broomall’s proposal on January 23, 1866. Schenck’s resolution is confusingly numbered, as it is identified in the Journal of the House of Representatives as H. R. No. 1, which indicates it is a bill rather than a resolution. However, the surrounding text clearly identifies it as a joint resolution: “Mr. Schenck, by unanimous consent, introduced a joint resolution (H. R. 1) proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to apportion representatives according to the number of voters in the several States; which was read a first and second time.” Journal of the House of Representatives, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 16, 32, 38 (December 5, 11, 1865) (hereafter cited as House: Journal). House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Docket Volume, 39th Cong. (HR21), Record Group 233, National Archives (hereafter cited as House Judiciary: Docket); House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Minutes, 39th Cong. (HR 1863), Record Group 233, National Archives (hereafter cited as House Judiciary: Minutes).

17. New York Daily Tribune, December 14, 1865, Papers: 1, 563n3. Many moderate-to-conservative Republicans in Congress seemed willing to expand the franchise to include only “literate” voters, thereby excluding many lower-class African Americans but also immigrants. Restricting the franchise to the literate seemed to be a way to support Republican policy on African Americans and yet at the same time prevent a wholesale enfranchisement of the emancipated. This support for a literate franchise foreshadowed some of the means used to disfranchise African Americans after Reconstruction ended. Jenckes’s resolution was referred to the Judiciary Committee, which rejected it. Congressional Globe, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 18 (December 11, 1865) (hereafter cited as CG); House Judiciary: Docket; House Judiciary: Minutes.

18. Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Ann Terry Greene Phillips, undated, before January 9, 1866, Papers: Microfilm, ser. 3, reel 11.

19. Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Gerrit Smith, New York, January 1, 1866, Papers: 1, 568.

20. Susan B. Anthony to Caroline Healey Dall, December 26, 1865, Papers: 1, 562–563.

21. Ibid., 563.

22. Elizabeth Cady Stanton to the editor, National Anti-Slavery Standard, December 26, 1865, Papers: 1, 564.

23. Ibid., 565. Stanton’s use of African American women in this argument is typical of the woman suffrage arguments she made at this time. Although there were a significant number of African American women involved in the suffrage movement, many of whom were allies of Stanton and Anthony in 1866, in this period Stanton seems to have been more interested in using the idea of black women’s disfranchisement than in truly assisting black women to achieve equal rights in a way consistent with their needs, worldview, and gender identities. For more on how white women suffragists disregarded the goals of African American suffragists see Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); and Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

24. Petitions and Memorials—Woman Suffrage. The other rights-related petitions submitted to Congress during this session that used the “will pray” language did not consistently include either the words “justice” or “equality” in their concluding sentence.

25. U.S. Const., art. IV, § 4.

26. Petitions and Memorials—Woman Suffrage.

27. Ibid.

28. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2, 1861–1876 (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1882), 91.

29. Stevens was long vilified in early Reconstruction histories as a heartless congressional dictator and biased author of unjust and corrupt policies imposed on the South. In the past fifty years, however, historians have come to admire his passion for his cause, as well as his political skill. See, for example, Fawn Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens, Scourge of the South (New York: Norton, 1966); and Hans Louis Trefousse, Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

30. On Fessenden, see Charles A. Jellison, Fessenden of Maine, Civil War Senator (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1962), and more recently Robert Cook, Civil War Senator William Pitt Fessenden and the Fight to Save the American Republic (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011).

31. Michael Les Benedict, A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863–1869 (New York: Norton, 1974), 38–39; Cook, Civil War Senator, 196.

32. Michael Les Benedict reports that Grimes was an early opponent of black suffrage, even before it became clear that President Johnson opposed it as well. Benedict, Compromise of Principle, 144, 353. Grimes has not benefited from a contemporary biography, but there is some good information in William Salter, James W. Grimes, Governor of Iowa, & U.S. Senator, 1854–1869 (New York: D. Appleton, 1870). See also Joseph B. James, The Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 44–45. There is no published biography of Howard, but Earl Maltz offers a rich description of his relationship to Reconstruction policy in a 2006 article, contending that Howard had a greater concern with constitutional limitations than did the radicals. Maltz, “Radical Politics and Constitutional Theory: Senator Jacob M. Howard of Michigan and the Problem of Reconstruction,” Michigan Historical Review 32, no. 1 (2006): 19–32.

33. There were two biographies produced on Williams in the mid-twentieth century, but nothing more recent has been published. Oscar Christensen, The Grand Old Man of Oregon; The Life of George H. Williams (Eugene, OR: University of Oregon, 1939); Sidney Teiser, “Life of George Williams: Almost Chief-Justice,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1946): 255–280; 47, no. 4 (1946): 417–440.

34. Note of interest: Ira Harris’s daughter Clara and her fiancé, Harris’s stepson Henry Rathbone, were the couple who accompanied Abraham and Mary Lincoln to Ford’s theater the night Lincoln was assassinated. Rathbone was injured in the attack. Elizabeth D. Leonard, Lincoln’s Avengers: Justice, Revenge, and Reunion after the Civil War (New York: Norton, 2004), 4–5.

35. Johnson’s primary claim to legal fame was that he had been one of two attorneys hired to defend John A. Sanford and to argue against Dred Scott’s citizenship before the Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sanford. Don Fehrenbacher notes that even after the decision had become controversial, Johnson remained a staunch defender of the Court and of Chief Justice Taney. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 282, 578, 580. Benedict, Compromise of Principle, 352; James, Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment, 45. On Johnson, see Bernard Christian Steiner, Life of Reverdy Johnson (Baltimore: Norman, Remington, 1914).

36. On Conkling, see David M. Jordan, Roscoe Conkling of New York: Voice in the Senate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971). On Bingham, see Erving E. Beauregard, Bingham of the Hills: Politician and Diplomat Extraordinary (New York: P. Lang, 1989). There seem to be no biographies written about Blow. However, his family is well represented in the historical record—Dred Scott had been born into slavery in the possession of Henry Blow’s parents, who sold him in 1830. Don E. Fehrenbacher, Slavery, Law and Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 121–122. Henry Taylor Blow fully supported Scott’s legal efforts, testifying in Scott’s case in Missouri. Ultimately, Henry’s brother, Taylor Blow, purchased and then emancipated Scott and his family. “Missouri’s Dred Scott Case, 1846–1857,” Missouri State Archives, http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/resources/africanamerican/scott/scott.asp. Also of note, Blow’s daughter, Susan Elizabeth, organized the first successful public kindergarten in the United States. “Susan Blow,” State Historical Society of Missouri, Historic Missourians, http://shs.umsystem.edu/historicmissourians/name/b/blow/index.html.

37. James, Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment, 44; Gaillard Hunt, Israel, Elihu and Cadwallader Washburn; A Chapter in American Biography (New York: Macmillan Company, 1925).

38. It appears that neither Grider nor Rogers was eminent enough to merit scholarly attention. Grider was elected to the House as a Whig in 1843 and served until 1847. He was reelected in 1861 and ’63 as a Unionist. He ran for the Thirty-Ninth Congress as a Democrat, serving until his death in September of 1866. Andrew Rogers was elected as a Democrat to the Thirty-Eighth Congress in 1863, reelected for the Thirty-Ninth, but defeated in 1866. “Biographical Directory of Congress, 1774–present,” United States Congress, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=G000455 and http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=R000387.

39. James, Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment, 42–43; Benedict, Compromise of Principle, 348–353. On Boutwell see Thomas Domer, “The Role of George S. Boutwell in the Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson,” New England Quarterly 49, no. 4 (1976): 596–617; Thomas H. Brown, George Sewall Boutwell, Human Rights Advocate (Groton, MA: Groton Historical Society, 1989). Morrill is best known for his role in establishing the land-grant colleges. On Morrill see William Belmont Parker, The Life and Public Services of Justin Smith Morrill (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924). Coy F. Cross, Justin Smith Morrill: Father of the Land-Grant Colleges (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999).

40. Although we know a fair bit about the political backgrounds and alignments of the committee’s members, their motivations remain opaque. At the committee’s first substantive meeting on January 9, the members passed a resolution to treat all committee activities, the ideas shared in its discussions, and the votes taken therein “as of a strictly confidential character, until otherwise ordered.” The one record that remains, the journal of the Joint Committee’s proceedings, reveals the process through which legislation was developed in the committee, but it did not record debates among the members. Benjamin B. Kendrick, ed., The Journal of the Joint Committee of Fifteen on Reconstruction, The Faculty of Political Science of Columbia University, Studies in History, Economics and Public Law (New York: Columbia University, 1914), 40.

41. Earl Maltz offers a comprehensive and informative analysis of the partisan, ideological, and personal divisions among the members of the Thirty-Ninth Congress in Civil Rights, the Constitution, and Congress, 1863–1869 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990).

42. Kendrick, Journal of the Joint Committee, 41.

43. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000). See chapter 1.

44. Stevens, although never taking any positive action on women’s enfranchisement, acknowledged the roadblock that gendered constitutional language would create. In his January 31, 1866, speech advocating the committee’s first version of the Fourteenth Amendment, he declared that he objected to Representative Schenck’s representation proposal because it used the word “male.” That word, Stevens said, “was never in the Constitution of the United States before. Why make a crusade against women in the Constitution of the nation?” The Congressional Globe reported that this comment was met with laughter. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 536–537 (January 31, 1866). Stevens went on to declare, “I certainly shall never vote to insert the word ‘male’ or the word ‘white’ in the national Constitution. Let these things be attended by the states.” Stevens, The Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer and Holly Byers Ochoa (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), 73–74. The committee members’ private positions on women’s voting rights were difficult to trace. For the months during which the Fourteenth Amendment was drafted, I was unable to find in the published correspondence of the members or in papers held at the Library of Congress any evidence of the committee members’ (or other prominent radicals’) perspective on women’s voting rights. Correspondence consulted: Palmer and Ochoa, Selected Papers of Thad-deus Stevens, April 1865–August 1868, vol. 2, 3–36; Thaddeus Stevens Papers, 1865, box 3, folder 1, Library of Congress; Sumner, The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, vol. 2, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 301–346; George Boutwell Papers, microfilm, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio; Roscoe Conkling Papers, 1769–1895, microfilm, Library of Congress; Elihu B. Washburne Papers, 1816–1887, 31.4 linear feet, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; William Pitt Fessenden Papers, 1832–1878, microfilm, Library of Congress; Justin Smith Morrill Papers, microfilm, Library of Congress.

45. Kendrick, Journal of the Joint Committee of Fifteen, 41. The Chicago Republican’s entire report on the committee stated, “The Reconstruction Committee held another meeting this morning, but the proceedings were not public.” “News from Washington… The Reconstruction Committee,” Chicago Republican, January 9, 1866, 4, col. 5.

46. Kendrick, Journal of the Joint Committee of Fifteen, 43.

47. Note that the lack of gendered language in this proposal implied that any state that disfranchised African American women would require the reduction of the state’s representation.

48. Kendrick, Journal of the Joint Committee of Fifteen, 53. The language in this plan repaired the gender problem of Morrill’s proposal: only when the ballot was denied because of race would representation be reduced.

49. House: Journal, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 179 (January 22, 1866).

50. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 141 (January 8, 1866).

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid., 357 (January 22, 1866).

54. Ibid., 358.

55. Ibid., 357.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid., 378 (January 23, 1866).

58. Ibid., 404 (January 24, 1866).

59. Ibid., 405.

60. Ibid., 433 (January 25, 1866).

61. Like Lawrence, Brooks conveniently overlooked the fact that women were represented under the current system.

62. Although Anthony had helped design her petition to appeal to Republicans by adopting their language, she was certainly not above playing politics by sending copies of the petition to Democrats like Brooks in the hope that they would push the Republicans in the right direction—a strategy she and Stanton would wield further in the later years of the 1860s. See chapter 6 below.

63. Because Brooks made his argument on January 23, 1866, he brought Stanton and Anthony’s petition to the attention of Congress a full day before Benjamin Gratz Brown officially presented it to the Senate.

64. Susan B. Anthony to James Brooks, January 20, 1866, printed in CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 380 (January 23, 1866).

65. Ibid., 379–380.

66. Ibid.

67. Ibid., 380.

68. House: Journal, 39th Cong., 1st sess.

69. The first petition presented was not referred to the Joint Committee on Reconstruction as the Senate had not yet passed the resolution establishing it. Of the other suffrage petitions that were not sent to the committee, three dealing with the constitution of Colorado were tabled, one was referred to the Committee on the Territories, and the final petition was specific to suffrage in the District of Columbia and was referred to that committee. Senate: Journal, 39th Cong., 1st sess.

70. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 390 (January 24, 1866). Brown was elected as an Unconditional Unionist (UU), but by the 1870s he had returned to the Democratic Party, running for vice president on the Democratic ticket with Horace Greeley in 1872. “Biographical Directory of Congress, 1774–present,” United States Congress, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=B000905.

71. House petitions followed a different trajectory. Most of the black male enfranchisement petitions sent to the House were referred to the Joint Committee. Fourteen of the nineteen woman suffrage petitions introduced in the House, however, were referred to the Judiciary Committee. Committee on the Judiciary, Petitions—Woman Suffrage, (HR 39A–H14.9), 39th Congress, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives, Washington DC.

72. Each body of Congress established its own set of rules, regulated by a committee on the rules. Given the large number of representatives compared with the relatively few senators, it seems reasonable that the House did not permit discussion over routine matters such as petitions.

73. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 829 (February 14, 1866).

74. Ibid., 951.

75. Ibid., 952.

76. Ibid.

77. Most other petitions supporting black men’s suffrage rights were presented to the House and Senate as universal suffrage petitions.

78. Petitions acknowledged as woman suffrage petitions are filed in the National Archives in Petitions and Memorials—Woman Suffrage. Those petitions italicized in table 2 were submitted as universal suffrage petitions but turned up in this folder. Their texts were identical to the other petitions requesting women’s enfranchisement. A few other woman suffrage petitions were filed with other “civil rights” petitions in Committee on the Judiciary, Petitions—Civil Rights, (HR39A–H14.2), 39th Congress, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives, Washington DC.

79. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 518 (January 31, 1866). It is questionable whether Lane knew that the petitioners were beautiful, but by claiming this he legitimated their position as respectable, feminine ladies rather than strong-minded masculine women and at the same time positioned himself and his fellow senators as their manly protectors.

80. Ibid., 518–519 (January 31, 1866).

81. See, for example, Sumner’s extensive speech opposing House Resolution 51 on February 6, 1866, ibid., 673–687.

82. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 704 (February 7, 1866).

83. Ibid., 705.

84. Senate: Journal, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 221–222 (March 9, 1866).

85. Bolstered by the growing schism between the president and the radicals in Congress caused by the president’s veto of the Freedman’s Bureau bill and Civil Rights bill, the radicals who earlier in the year might have compromised by agreeing to House Resolution 51 in order to avoid a party schism instead voted against it. Ibid., 221; James, Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment, 55–91; Eric L. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

86. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 1320 (March 12, 1866).

87. Stevens’s omnibus proposal was modeled after one suggested to him by social reformer Robert Dale Owen. James, Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment, 100–101; Kendrick, Journal of the Joint Committee of Fifteen, 83–84.

88. Kendrick, Journal of the Joint Committee of Fifteen, 102.

89. James, Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment, 112.

90. Robert Dale Owen, “Political Results from the Varioloid,” Atlantic Monthly, June 1875, 665.

91. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 2459 (May 8, 1866).

92. Ibid., 2511 (May 9, 1866); House: Journal, 685–687 (May 10, 1866).

93. CG, 39th Congress, 1st sess. 2766 (May 23, 1866).

94. Ibid.

95. Madison’s collected writings had been published in 1865. James Madison, Letters and Other Writings of James Madison: Fourth President of the United States (Philadelphia, PA: J.B. Lippincott), 1865; CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 2767 (May 23, 1866).

96. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 2767 (May 23, 1866).

97. Senate: Journal, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 504–505 (June 8, 1866).

98. House: Journal, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 834 (June 13, 1866); Senate: Journal, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 527 (June 15, 1866).

99. Senate: Journal, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 501 (June 8, 1866).

100. James, Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment, 73, 93, 97; Ohio senator John Sherman received a letter from the editor of the Cincinnati Gazette, suggesting that it did not particularly matter whether House Resolution 127 could pass, so long as it offered “a scheme,—upon which we can go into the election.” E. D. Mansfield to John Sherman, May 2, 1866, John Sherman Papers, Library of Congress, cited in James, Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment, 122. On a solely pragmatic level, Republicans could have preferred the gender-based amendment language because it more closely reflected the language states used to define their voting populations. (See chapter 1.)

101. Some evidence for this comes from congressional correspondence. Senator Lyman Trumbull, Republican of Illinois, received a letter from a Chicago constituent, E. Larned, who objected to the use of the word “male” in any representation provision but acknowledged that “the omission of ‘male’ might reduce the amendment’s chances of ratification.” E. Larned to Lyman Trumbull, March 10, 1866, Lyman Trumbull Papers, Library of Congress, cited in and paraphrased by James, Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment, 91.

102. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 2987 (June 6, 1866).

6. White Women’s Rights

1. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2, 1861–1876 (New York: Fowler & Wells 1882), 171 (hereafter cited as HWS: 2).

2. HWS: 2, 170. The convention received Anthony’s letter to Congress, the New York Times reported, “with tumultuous clappings of kidded hands.” “The May Anniversaries,” New York Times, May 11, 1866, 8.

3. “Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, In the School of Anti-Slavery, ed. Ann D. Gordon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 587 (hereafter cited as Papers: 1). Equal suffrage faced an uphill battle in New York State. The legislature had repeatedly opted to keep property restrictions for African American male voters. In 1846 and 1860, the state’s voters rejected referenda that would have allowed black men to vote without restriction. Phyllis Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982).

4. Papers: 1, 585. Although Stanton appeared at most of these meetings, Anthony was almost always present. She was often joined by prominent African American activist Charles Remond; young equality activist Bessie Bisbee; well-known radical newspaper editor Parker Pillsbury; America’s first ordained female minister, Olympia Brown; and Louisa Jacobs, daughter of the self-emancipated author and abolitionist Harriet Jacobs. The lecture schedule was so tight, however, that the speakers had to “stagger their arrivals and departures” and so may not have shared the stage at any given meeting. “Itinerary of ECS and SBA Indicating Events Documented on Film,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, ed. Patricia G. Holland and Ann D. Gordon (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1991), microfilm, ser. 3, reel 11 (hereafter cited as Papers: Microfilm). Editorial note, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 2, Against an Aristocracy of Sex, ed. Ann D. Gordon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 23 (hereafter cited as Papers: 2); Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 92.

5. Petition, New York State Equal Rights Convention, November 21, 1866, Papers: 1, 603.

6. Dudden notes that given the conservative turn the state Republican Party leadership was taking in 1867, getting outsiders elected to the convention was the suffrage advocates’ best strategy for expanding the franchise in New York. Thus the AERA had additional motivation to advocate universal suffrage in the election of convention delegates. Dudden, Fighting Chance, 101.

7. Susan B. Anthony, speech to the Equal Rights Convention meeting, December 6, 1866, Papers: 2, 2.

8. Resolutions of the Equal Rights Convention in Syracuse, New York, December 14, 1866, Papers: 2, 8.

9. Auburn Daily Advocate, January 7, 1866, 3.

10. Speech by Susan B. Anthony to the Equal Rights Convention in Troy, New York, February 18, 1867, Papers: 2, 24.

11. The meeting held in Rochester attracted a larger crowd, at six hundred. Editorial note, Papers: 2, 6. However, the Syracuse meeting had low turnout. Ibid., 8.

12. Yates County Chronicle, December 20, 1866, 2.

13. Yates County Chronicle, December 27, 1866, 2.

14. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Address in Favor of Universal Suffrage: For the Election of Delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Before the Judiciary Committees of the Legislature of New York, in the Assembly Chamber, January 23, 1867, in Behalf of the American Equal Rights Association (Albany: Weed, Parsons, 1867), 6.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., 7.

18. Ibid., 9.

19. Ibid.

20. Stanton’s correspondence indicates that sarcasm was a deliberate rhetorical strategy. Writing to Frederick Douglass about the speech, she said, “I hope if it is possible you will be in Albany for both our claims should be set off in the strongest way & you can attack the property qualification with all the force of your sarcasm far better than I could, who am a long stride behind even that.” Stanton to Frederick Douglass, January 8, 1867, Papers: 2, 11–12.

21. Stanton, Address in Favor of Universal Suffrage, 11. Article 2, section 3 of the constitution declared that no person should lose their voting residency requirements “while kept at any alms house or other asylum, at public expense; nor while confined in any public prison.” Benjamin P. Poore, The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the United States, Part II (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1878), 1353.

22. Stanton, Address in Favor of Universal Suffrage, 11.

23. Ibid.

24. The activists’ hope that partisan outsiders would dominate the convention was thwarted by the method by which delegates at large were selected, which Dudden notes, ensured that “a corps of party hacks would be scrutinizing every convention proposal for partisan risk and advantage.” Dudden, Fighting Chance, 102.

25. HWS: 2, 286. Dudden contends that at the conclusion of their campaign “the AERA leaders had to regard the 1867 New York Constitutional Convention as principally an occasion for propagandizing their cause.” Dudden, Fighting Chance, 102. I agree that the suffragists knew there was virtually no chance that New York would enfranchise women. However, I do believe that the convention was more to them than a propaganda showcase. They had sufficient faith in this particular political moment to risk a new rhetorical strategy that challenged the Republican/abolitionist alliance that had proven so dissatisfactory in Congress.

26. Edward F. Underhill, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the Constitutional Convention of the State of New York, Held in 1867 and 1868, in the City of Albany (Albany: Weed, Parsons, 1868), 38 (June 11, 1867) (hereafter cited as NY1868). The AERA opposed this move, and Stanton wrote a letter to the New York Tribune rejecting it as “a work of supererogation.” Graves’s motion was subsequently tabled. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Female Suffrage Committee,” New York Tribune, June 19, 1867, Papers: 2, 72.

27. NY1868, 96 (June 19, 1867). Curtis was a friend and colleague of the American transcendentalists, contributor and political editor to Harper’s Monthly, a founding figure in the Republican Party, and a delegate at large to the convention. Mabel Abbott and Gail Schneider, Biographical Note, Finding Aid, George William Curtis Papers, Special Collection in the Archives and Library of the Staten Island Museum, http://www.statenislandmuseum.org/images/uploads/collections/Curtis_(George_William)_Papers_Finding_Aids.pdf. Curtis had long supported women’s enfranchisement, and in July he made a lengthy and erudite speech urging the convention to enfranchise New York’s women. It was reprinted later by the AERA as a pamphlet: George William Curtis, Equal Rights for Woman (American Equal Rights Association, 1867). For copies of the petition sent to the New York State Constitutional Convention, see Papers: Microfilm, ser. 3, reel 12.

28. As late as its annual meeting in May 10, the AERA considered a resolution praising Greeley for supporting woman suffrage in his newspaper. “Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association in New York,” May 9–10, 1867, Papers: 2, 62.

29. The New York Times, in a lengthy critical editorial, called Greeley’s support of Davis repulsive and inexpedient, “simply detestable,” and speculated that it derived from a growing “love of notoriety.” New York Times, May 28, 1867.

30. Stanton began the meeting, giving a version of her February speech to the legislature. Editorial note, “Hearing Before the Committee on Suffrage, New York Constitutional Convention, in Albany,” Papers: 2, 75.

31. New York Daily Tribune, Friday, June 28, 1867, 5, col. 2.

32. New York Herald, no date. From DLC, Rare Books Division, S. B. Anthony Scrapbook no. 2, in Papers: Microfilm, ser. 3, reel 12. The New York Tribune reported that the audience applauded this remark. “Hearing before the Committee on Suffrage, New York Constitutional Convention, in Albany,” New York Tribune, June 27, 1867, Papers: 2, 76.

33. Albany Evening Journal, June 28, 1867, HWS: 2, 284.

34. Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Martha C. Wright in Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences, ed. Theodore Stanton and Harriot Stanton Blatch (New York: Arno, 1969), 2:116.

35. Ibid.

36. Given the timing of its presentation, it is likely this report was prepared before Stanton and Anthony appeared before the Suffrage Committee.

37. NY1868, 176–179 (June 28, 1867).

38. Ibid., 178–179.

39. Ibid., 178.

40. Beginning with the American Revolution, the argument that military service bestowed voting privileges had long enabled the disfranchised to acquire the right to vote. Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy. See chapter 1.

41. NY1868, 270 (July 13, 1867).

42. Ibid.

43. For a discussion of the term “manly” see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 16–23; Elliott Gorn, T he Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 140–147; and Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 10–30. At least one contemporary source indicates that the term “manhood” did not refer to all persons. At the first annual meeting of the AERA on May 9, 1867, Parker Pillsbury stated, “Manhood or malehood suffrage is not a remedy for evils such as we wish to remove.” HWS: 2, 205.

44. NY1868, 207 (July 9, 1867).

45. Ibid., 213.

46. Ibid., 331 (July 17, 1867).

47. Papers: 2, 75n5.

48. “Mass Convention in Westchester Co., New York,” National Anti-Slavery Standard (New York), July 20, 1867, Papers: Microfilm, ser. 3, reel 12. On July 12, Stanton sent a letter to the editor of the New York Tribune (Horace Greeley) that began, “Sir: Allow me through your column to ask the pardon of Gens. Merritt and Morris, Cols. Duganne, Seaver, and Axtell, for ignorantly robbing them of the glory and honorable scars won in the second revolution. But, Mr. Editor, if the ‘bullet and ballot’ do go together, remember women fought in the late war; some fought and died on the battlefield. If they did not do as much as man to prosecute the war, they did far more to mitigate its horrors.” Here she backed away from her assertive tactics and adopted Anthony’s more subtle argument about women’s military service. New York Tribune, July 12, 1867, 2, col. 3.

49. There is some evidence that the $300 fee for sending a substitute was actually accessible to many, regardless of social class. Societies were formed to help poorer men pay the fee, and a fairly affordable draft insurance was sold that would pay it if a man was drafted. So despite the reputation of the war as a “poor man’s fight,” this was not necessarily exclusively due to commutation fees. See James McPherson and James K. Hogue, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), 385. However, it was certainly easier for the wealthy to pay substitutes.

50. Anthony wrote to Anna Elizabeth Dickinson on July 12, 1867, that Curtis “is very earnest & true, it seems to me.” Papers: 2, 79.

51. NY1868, 283 (July 16, 1867). On September 1, Stanton wrote to Emily How-land that Curtis had presented the petition “by our engineering.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Emily Howland, September 1, 1867, in Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed, 2:117. Mary Greeley’s suffrage activism continued after the New York convention, when she became an executive officer of the AERA during 1868 and petitioned Congress in 1868 during the Fifteenth Amendment debates. Papers: 2, 189–190n6.

52. New York Times, July 18, 1867, 1, col. 6; HWS: 2, 287.

53. The suffragists later suggested that the presentation of Curtis’s petition was a deliberate strategy specifically designed to draw attention to Greeley in the press. HWS: 2, 286–287.

54. World (New York), July 18, 1867, 1, col. 4.

55. New York Herald, July 18, 1867, 6, col. 5.

56. Petitions from women were presented to the convention in many different ways. On June 26, Curtis submitted a petition headed by the signature of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s mother, who was listed as “Mrs. Daniel Cady,” perhaps because Daniel Cady was a well-known lawyer in the state. But on June 28, there were multiple petitions sent from women. These all used the honorific “Mrs.” and the woman’s own first and last names (Mrs. Eliza Osborn, Mrs. Lina Vandenberg) or under her own name or initials, Lucretia Sutton, A. H. Sabin. NY1868, 176–177 (June 28, 1867).

57. In her biography of Victoria Woodhull, Barbara Goldsmith depicts Mary Cheney Greeley as a deeply unhappy, depressed, manic woman who probably killed one of her children through neglect. Further, she argues that the Greeleys’ marriage was extremely troubled. Stanton and Anthony may have been aware of this and thus taken advantage of the rift in the family. Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Wood-hull (New York: Knopf, 1998), 55–62, 132–133. Stanton claimed that Greeley’s anger resulted in immediate retaliation. When they met at a party a few weeks after the petition was presented, he reportedly told Stanton that he had “given strict orders at the Tribune office that you and your cause are to be tabooed in the future, and if it is necessary to mention your name, you will be referred to as ‘Mrs. Henry B. Stanton.’” Stanton to Emily Howland, in Papers: Microfilm, ser. 3, reel 12. However, the editors of The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony have found that Greeley did not begin referring to Stanton as Mrs. Henry Stanton until after her National Woman Suffrage Association passed a resolution criticizing Greeley and his paper on July 7, 1869. Papers: 2, 77n3.

58. NY1868, 364–372 (July 18, 1867). Dudden notes, however, that none of the major New York papers carried Curtis’s speech, and so woman suffrage did not appear to the public to be a major issue in the convention. Dudden, Fighting Chance, 103.

59. NY1868, 416–444, 453–470, 537–540 (July 22, 23, 25, 1867).

60. Bickford went on to say, “Small chance then will gentlemen have to ‘catch the speaker’s eye,’ especially if the speaker be a ladies’ man, as he will be if any man at all.” NY1868, 443 (July 22, 1867).

61. NY1868, 540 (July 25, 1867).

62. Ibid., 428 (July 22, 1867).

63. Ibid., 428–430.

64. Ibid., 430.

65. Ibid., 456 (July 23, 1867).

66. Ibid., 442 (July 22, 1867).

67. Ibid., 441. On July 10, 1867, Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell spoke at the capitol, arguing that even if woman suffrage was not made part of the constitution, it should be submitted to the voters as a referendum. Papers: 2, 80n1.

68. NY1868, 538, 540.

69. Ibid., 537.

70. In New York, no expansion of the franchise ever took place as a result of the constitutional convention. In 1869, the state’s voters defeated the convention’s proposed constitutional changes. Ernest Henry Breuer, ed., Constitutional Developments in New York, 1777–1958: A Bibliography of Conventions and Constitutions with Selected References for Constitutional Research (Albany, NY: State Education Department, 1958), 33–35. But New York was not alone: in July Michigan’s constitutional convention considered but defeated woman suffrage, as did the Connecticut Legislature. Papers: 2, 86–87nn1–2.

71. Papers: 2, 88–89. Wood’s position on black suffrage was consistent with the position that Stanton and Anthony were evolving—he repeatedly refused to support the expansion of the franchise to include black men if it did not also include women. Ibid., 49–50n2. Historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn has argued that Wood never supported black male suffrage. Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 30. Kansas African American activist Charles Langston reported that an “impartial suffrage” convention Wood had convened in early April was less friendly to black suffrage than to woman suffrage. Lucy Stone to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, April 10, 1867, Papers: 2, 48–49, 51n6. Dudden notes that Wood had “alienated supporters of black suffrage by persistently amending black suffrage measures to include women, and voting against them when they did not.” Further, she reports that Wood and Langston had frequently clashed in the past and continued to do so throughout the Kansas suffrage referenda campaigns. Dudden, Fighting Chance, 109, 111–113, 120–122.

72. HWS: 2, 232. On women’s rights politics in Kansas, see Michael L. Goldberg, An Army of Women: Gender and Politics in Gilded Age Kansas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), and Marilyn S. Blackwell and Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel, Frontier Feminist: Clarina Howard Nichols and the Politics of Motherhood (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010). The best account of the 1867 Kansas campaign can be found in Faye Dudden’s book Fighting Chance.

73. Dudden, Fighting Chance, 140.

74. Henry Blackwell returned to Kansas in October, and Olympia Brown continued her activism through the November elections, joining Stanton and Anthony for a few of their early meetings. Papers: 2, 88–89nn2, 4. Other local Kansan suffragists organized and agitated to support the woman suffrage referendum. Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 84–85.

75. DuBois , Feminism and Suffrage, 91; Susan B. Anthony to Anna E. Dickinson, September 23, 1867, Papers: 2, 92, 94n6. Notably absent from this statement of support was Greeley himself.

76. Susan B. Anthony to Anna E. Dickinson, September 23, 1867, Papers: 2, 92.

77. HWS: 2, 931. Olympia Brown recalled that these speakers “were sent out under the auspices of the Republican Party to blackguard and abuse the advocates of woman’s cause while professedly speaking upon ‘manhood suffrage.’” HWS: 2, 260–261.

78. Papers: 2, 93n5.

79. HWS: 2, 250.

80. Cited in Dudden, Fighting Chance, 118. Dudden notes that the suicide of Kansas Republican Senator and leader James Lane had left the state party in disarray, creating openings for intraparty conflict and maneuvering to gain control of Kansas’s Republican machine. Ibid., 110, 131.

81. Ibid., 118.

82. Ibid., 124. Dudden finds that the members of this organization seemed to have effectively taken control of the Kansas Republican Party. She also reports that Kansas’s Republicans neglected to campaign for black men’s voting rights. In particular, they snubbed Charles Langston, the most prominent African American leader in the state, which in turn created a degree of animosity between Langston and the women’s rights leaders in the state. Ibid., 111, 121–123.

83. Some suffragists later reported that they faced hostility from local African American leaders. See, for example, Olympia Brown’s contribution to the chapter on Kansas in HWS: 2, 261.

84. There were earlier indications that the suffragists could use Democrats for their own purposes. In the petition campaign of 1866, Elizabeth Cady Stanton had written to Martha Coffin Wright that “we have had a thousand petitions printed, and when they are filled they will be sent to Democratic members who will present them to the House. But if they come back to us empty, Susan and I will sign every one, so that every Democratic member may have one with which to shame those hypocritical Republicans.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Martha Coffin Pelham Wright, New York, January 6, 1866, Papers: Microfilm, ser. 3, reel 11.

85. Papers: 2, 51 n10. Dudden notes that Robinson had cooperated with Democrats as early as 1864, a fact that made other Republicans suspect his loyalty. She suggests that Robinson was less interested in what Democrats could do for women’s voting rights than in what they could do for his own electoral prospects. Dudden, Fighting Chance, 110–112.

86. HWS: 2, 234. Two weeks later, Stone’s husband, Henry Blackwell, used almost the same language in a letter to Stanton and Anthony, saying that “if the Republicans came out against us the Democrats will take us up.” H. B. Blackwell to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, April 21, 1867, Papers: 2, 51n10.

87. Ellen Carol DuBois reports that Lawrence County Democrats collaborated with woman suffrage Republicans to oppose the standard Republican party line, and that in Leavenworth, Democrats added woman suffrage to their printed ballots. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 92.

88. Ibid., 93.

89. Dudden, Fighting Chance, 127–128.

90. In a speech recorded in his published account of the Kansas campaign, Train described himself as “that wonderful eccentric, independent, extraordinary genius, and political reformer of America.” George Francis Train, The Great Epigram Campaign of Kansas: Championship of Woman, Thirty Speeches in Two Weeks in All Parts of Kansas, (Leavenworth, KS: Prescott & Hume, 1867), 40. For more on Train’s background, see Dudden, Fighting Chance, 127–129, 136.

91. Anthony wrote to Anna Dickinson about Train: “But, how funny; that Geo. Francis Train is coming into the state for a month—to talk for woman—what sort of a furor he will make.” Papers: 2, 93.

92. Historians have debated Train’s impact on both the success of the referendum in Kansas and the suffragists’ racism. Some situate him at the center of the move to seek Democratic approval, essentially blaming his influence for the suffragists’ use of racist rhetoric. This deemphasizes the active role woman suffrage supporters took in creating their own partisan political strategy and shifts the focus of historical analyses away from the political context that constrained their actions. For example, Ellen DuBois asserts that Stanton and Anthony abandoned their own abolitionist traditions and turned to “Train’s racism.” DuBois , Feminism and Suffrage, 96.

93. Henry Blackwell, “What the South Can Do: How the Southern States Can Make Themselves Masters of the Situation,” New York, January 15, 1867, in Printed Ephemera Collection, portfolio 127, folder 11, Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbpe.12701100.

94. Train, Great Epigram Campaign, 32.

95. Ibid., 8–9.

96. HWS: 2, 244.

97. Dudden, Fighting Chance, 121–124.

98. Ibid., 130.

99. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815–1897 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 247.

100. William Lloyd Garrison to Susan B. Anthony, January 4, 1868, Papers: 2, 125.

101. Dudden, Fighting Chance, 133–135.

102. Congressional Globe, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 219 (January 12, 1866) (hereafter cited as CG).

103. Ibid., 218.

104. Historian Jean Baker has argued that racism and racist cultural productions such as minstrel shows and songs provided the means by which Democrats could construct party unity through an emphasis on the collective whiteness of its members. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).

105. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 3214 (June 16, 1866).

106. CG, 39th Cong., 2nd sess. 84 (December 12, 1866). At this point, Doolittle was a Republican; however, he supported President Johnson and in 1868 joined the Democratic Party. In light of his later defection, and given the nature of his comments, I considered them Democratic rhetoric. See “Biographical Directory of Congress, 1774–present,” United States Congress, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=D000428.

107. House of Representatives, Report No. 2 on Suffrage in the District of Columbia, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 1–2 (December 19, 1865), The Reports of the Committees of the House of Representatives made during the First Session Thirty-Ninth Congress, 1865–66 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1866).

108. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 1268 (March 8, 1866).

109. Ibid., 246 (January 16, 1866).

110. See Diane Miller Sommerville, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Diane Miller Sommerville, “The Rape Myth in the Old South Reconsidered,” in A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men’s History and Masculinity, vol. 1, ed. Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Crystal Nicole Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Martha Hodes, “The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics: White Women and Black Men in the South after the Civil War,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3, no. 3 (1993): 402–417.

111. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. app. 133 (February 26, 1866).

112. Ibid., app. 182 (April 6, 1866).

113. Sommerville, “Rape Myth in the Old South,” 438–472, esp. 439–442. See also George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914, 2nd ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971, 1987); and Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

114. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 196 (January 11, 1866).

115. Ibid., 177 (January 10, 1866).

116. Although Cowan was a conservative Republican, he disagreed with the party’s Reconstruction policy, and his arguments nearly always adopted Democratic Party rhetoric to oppose that policy; therefore, I believe it justified to consider his rhetoric within the context of the Democratic Party. See Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 237; and “Biographical Directory of Congress, 1774–present,” United States Congress, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=C000819.

117. CG, 39th Cong., 2nd sess. 62 (December 11, 1866).

118. CG, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 203 (January 11, 1866).

119. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 103–104.

120. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Who Are Our Friends,” Revolution, vol. 1, no. 2, January 15, 1868, 24. Unless otherwise cited, all Revolution articles are from Papers: Microfilm, series 1, reels 1–3.

121. Stanton, “Who Are Our Friends,” 24.

122. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “To Our Radical Friends,” Revolution, vol. 1, no. 19, May 14, 1868, 296.

123. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Mrs. Stanton before the District Committee,” Revolution, vol. 3, no. 5, February 4, 1869, 88.

124. Susan B. Anthony, “Susan B. Anthony in Tammany Hall,” Revolution, vol. 2, no. 1, July 9, 1868, 1.

125. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “William Lloyd Garrison Crucifies Democrats, Train, and the Women of ‘The Revolution,’” Revolution, vol. 1, no. 4, January 29, 1868, 50.

126. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Sharp Points,” Revolution, vol. 1, no. 14, April 9, 1868, 212–213.

127. Stanton, “William Lloyd Garrison Crucifies Democrats.”

128. Stanton, “Mrs. Stanton before the District Committee.”

129. Noah Webster and Chauncy A. Goodrich, An American Dictionary of the English Language, rev. ed. (Springfield, MA: George and Charles Merriam, 1860), 1100.

130. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Women and Black Men,” Revolution, vol. 3, no. 5, February 4, 1869, 88.

131. Dudden, Fighting Chance, 155–160. Blair joined the Republican Party to reject slavery’s expansion and had served in Congress as a conservative Republican in the 1850s. But after the war his virulent racism and opposition to Reconstruction pushed him to the Democrats, who nominated him for the vice presidency in 1868. “Biographical Directory of Congress, 1774–present,” United States Congress, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=B000523. For more on Blair, see William Earl Parrish, Frank Blair: Lincoln’s Conservative (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998).

132. “Grand Democratic Demonstration at Indianapolis; Gen. Blair’s Speech,” New Orleans Times, September 29, 1868, 1.

133. Ibid.

134. Ibid., 2.

135. Ibid., 1.

136. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Frank Blair on Woman’s Suffrage,” Revolution, vol. 2, no. 13, October 1, 1868, 200. Note here that in addressing her argument to “women of the republic,” Stanton assumes a white female readership, in typical fashion completely ignoring the perspective of African American women.

137. Dudden, Fighting Chance, 159.

138. Neither Stanton nor Anthony self-identified as a Democrat. Stanton was more comfortable with, and had family connections to, the party, but never, as far as we know, declared herself a Democrat. However, this did not stop the two women in a time of political flux and in the midst of the search for allies from turning to the Democrats as a possible source of support for their particular cause. It is also well documented that the suffragists also sought connections with working women’s associations and labor organizations in this same period. See DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 105–162.

139. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Gerrit Smith on Petitions,” Revolution, vol. 3, no. 2, January 14, 1869, 24.

140. Ibid., 130.

141. On the evolution of racism and feminism in the post-Reconstruction women’s rights movement, see Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Conclusion

1. Congressional Globe, 40th Cong., 3rd sess. 286 (January 11 1869) (hereafter cited as CG). Its language would be slightly altered through the amendment process so that the final Fifteenth Amendment would read: “The right of citizens to vote shall not be denied by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” U.S. Congress, Statutes at Large, 40th Congress, 3rd sess., no. 14, 346. On the politics behind and evolution of the Fifteenth Amendment see William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965); and Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997).

2. Although this proposed Fifteenth Amendment tacitly permitted states to disfranchise people on the basis of their sex, it did not specify the gender of the protected citizens.

3. CG, 40th Cong., 3rd sess. 561 (January 23, 1869).

4. Ibid., 1013 (February 8, 1869).

5. Ibid., 1001 app., 289–290 (February 8, 1869).

6. Ibid., app., 169 (February 6, 1869).

7. Ibid. Bayard’s position is interesting given his family connections. Bayard’s brother, Edward Bayard, was married to Tryphena Cady, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s sister. Egbert Cleave, Cleave’s Biographical Cyclopaedia of Homoeopathic Physicians and Surgeons (Philadelphia: Galaxy, 1873), 51; “Biographical Directory of Congress, 1774–present,” United States Congress, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=B000248.

8. CG, 40th Cong., 3rd sess. 1239 (February 15, 1869).

9. Bingham presented his version on January 29, 1869. It declared, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge or deny to any male citizen of the United States of sound mind and twenty-one years of age or upward the equal exercise, subject to such registration laws as the State may establish, of the elective franchise at all elections in the State wherein he shall have actually resided for a period of one year preceding such election, except such of said citizens as shall engage in rebellion or insurrection, or who may have been, or shall be, duly convicted of treason or other infamous crime.” Ibid., 728 (January 29, 1869). Bingham’s amendment only received twenty-four votes. Senate: Journal, 40th Cong., 3rd sess. 235 (January 30, 1869).

10. Bingham’s colleague Samuel Shellabarger, a moderate Republican from Ohio, proposed a similar amendment. His was likewise defeated 122–61. CG, 40th Cong., 3rd sess. 744 (January 30, 1869).

11. Ibid., 1317 (February 17, 1869). While the other amendments Conkling referred to were most likely those like the ones proposed by Bingham and Shellabarger, it is not inconceivable that he could have also been thinking of the Fourteenth Amendment.

12. Historian Glenda Gilmore argues that this is exactly what happened in North Carolina, as white men sought to redefine black men as rapists and therefore dangerous to white women if empowered with the franchise. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

13. Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Gerrit Smith, January 1, 1866, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, In the School of Anti-Slavery, ed. Ann D. Gordon et al. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 569.